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SEEING THINGS 
AT NIGHT 



BY 



HEYWOOD BROUN 




NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
1921 






N 



COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



NOV -3 192! 



PRINTED IN THE U S A. BY 

THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY. N J 



§)C!.A627549 



TO 

HEYWOOD BROUN, 3rd 



Introduction 

The first difficulty was the title. It was felt that 
Seeing Things at Night might suggest theatrical 
essays to the exclusion of anything else. That was 
not the author's intention. He meant to suggest 
rather newspaper articles of any sort done more or 
less on the spur of the moment for next day's consump- 
tion. There was also some question as to the order in 
which the various "pieces" should be arranged. The 
author was tempted to follow the example of Adolf 
Wolff, a free verse poet who published a volume some 
years ago called Songs, Sighs and Curses, and ex- 
plained in a foreword, "When asked in what sequence 
he would arrange his poems, Wolff threw the manu- 
scripts in the air, saying 'Let Fate decide.' They now 
appear in the order in which they were picked up from 
the floor." 

Broun, however, feared that some of his essays 
might crash through the floor like the mistakes of a 
cannonball juggler and that others would prove so 
lacking in weight when put to the test that it would be 
necessary to pluck them from the ceiling rather than 
the floor. The arrangement, therefore, is premeditated 
though haphazard. In respect to his age the author 
also wishes to explain that the character, H. 3rd, who 



vi Introduction 



appears from time to time is his son and not his grand- 
son. He also wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of 
The New York Tribune, Vanity Fair, McCall's, Col- 
lier's Weekly and The Nation in permitting him to 
reprint various articles which first appeared in their 
pages. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction v 

The Fifty-First Dragon 3 

How To Be a Lion Tamer . . . . 16 

H. G. Wells of England 24 

Promises and Contracts and Clocks . . 29 

Alcoholic Liquors 33 

vSome of My Best Friends Are Yale Men . 38 

Bacillus and Circumstance .... 44 

Death Says It Isn't So 57 

The Library of a Lover 69 

A Bolt from the Blue 73 

Inasmuch 77 

H. 3D — The Review of a Continuous Per- 
formance 81 

Southpaws 123 

Michael 130 

Buying a Farm 133 

Romance and Reticence 143 

A Robe for the King 147 

Turning Thirty 159 

Margaret Fuller 163 

Holding a Baby 168 

Red Magic 176 

The Last Trump 185 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Spanking Manners 189 

Park Row and Fleet Street . . . .194 
Merrick's Women . . . . . 197 

Just Around the Corner 201 

Reform Through Reading . . . .204 

Shush! 207 

A Test for Critics 212 

Gray Gods and Green Goddesses . . .215 

The Cosmic Kid 221 

A Jung Man's Fancy 225 

Deburau 231 

A Reviewer's Notebook 238 



SEEING THINGS AT NIGHT 



The Fifty-first Dragon 

Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le 
Cceur-Hardy was among the least promising. He was 
tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that 
he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when 
the jousting class was called, although his companions 
and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his 
better nature by shouting to him to come out and break 
his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the 
lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies 
and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine 
refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and 
the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing 
the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Pro- 
fessor could see no remedy but expulsion. 

"No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at 
the purple hills which ringed the school, "I think I'll 
train him to slay dragons." 

"He might be killed," objected the Assistant Pro- 
fessor. 

"So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but 
he added, more soberly, "We must consider the greater 
good. We are responsible for the formation of this 
lad's character." 

"Are the dragons particularly bad this year?" inter- 

3 



Seeing Things at Night 



rupted the Assistant Professor. This was characteris- 
tic. He always seemed restive when the head of the 
school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the institu- 
tion. 

"I've never known them worse," replied the Head- 
master. "Up in the hills to the south last week they 
killed a number of peasants, two cows and a prize pig. 
And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they 
may start a forest fire simply by breathing around 
indiscriminately." 

"Would any refund on the tuition fee be necessary in 
case of an accident to young Cceur-Hardy?" 

"No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all 
covered in the contract. But as a matter of fact he 
won't be killed. Before I send him up in the hills I'm 
going to give him a magic word." 

"That's a good idea," said the Professor. "Some- 
times they work wonders." 

From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons. 
His course included both theory and practice. In the 
morning there were long lectures on the history, 
anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine 
did not distinguish himself in these studies. He had 
a marvelously versatile gift for forgetting things. In 
the afternoon he showed to better advantage, for then 
he would go down to the South Meadow and practise 
with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impres- 
sive, for he had enormous strength as well as speed 



The Fifty -first Dragon 



and grace. He even developed a deceptive display of 
ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling sight 
to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the 
dummy paper dragon which had been set up for his 
practice. As he ran he would brandish his ax and 
shout "A murrain on thee!" or some other vivid bit of 
campus slang. It never took him more than one stroke 
to behead the dummy dragon. 

Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper 
gave way to papier-mache and finally to wood, but 
even the toughest of these dummy dragons had no 
terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did 
the business. There were those who said that when 
the practice was protracted until dusk and the dragons 
threw long, fantastic shadows across the meadow 
Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so 
loudly. It is possible there was malice in this charge. 
At any rate, the Headmaster decided by the end of 
June that it was time for the test. Only the night be- 
fore a dragon had come close to the school grounds 
and had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden. 
The faculty decided that Gawaine was ready. They 
gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and the Head- 
master summoned him to a private conference. 

"Sit down," said the Headmaster. "Have a ciga- 
rette." 

Gawaine hesitated. 

"Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Head- 



Seeing Things at Night 



master. "But after all, you have received your pre- 
liminary degree. You are no longer a boy. You are a 
man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the 
great world of achievement." 

Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered 
him a match, but he produced one of his own and 
began to puff away with a dexterity which quite 
amazed the principal. 

"Here you have learned the theories of life," con- 
tinued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his 
discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories. 
Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the 
old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard 
and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for exam- 
ple, is to slay dragons." 

"They say that those dragons down in the south 
wood are five hundred feet long," ventured Gawaine, 
timorously. 

"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Headmaster. "The 
curate saw one last week from the top of Arthur's Hill. 
The dragon was sunning himself down in the valley. 
The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him 
very long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back 
to make a report to me. He said the monster, or shall 
I say, the big lizard? — wasn't an inch over two hun- 
dred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it. 
You'll find the big ones even easier than the little 
ones. They're far slower on their feet and less aggres- 



The Fifty -first Dragon 



sive, I'm told. Besides, before you go I'm going to 
equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear 
of all the dragons in the world." 

"I'd like an enchanted cap/' said Gawaine. 

"What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily. 

"A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine. 

The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't 
believe all those old wives' stories," he said. "There 
isn't any such thing. A cap to make you disappear, 
indeed! What would you do with it? You haven't 
even appeared yet. Why, my boy, you could walk 
from here to London, and nobody would so much as 
look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more 
invisible than that." 

Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into 
his old habit of whimpering. The Headmaster reas- 
sured him: "Don't worry; I'll give you something much 
better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you 
a magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this 
magic charm once and no dragon can possibly harm a 
hair of your head. You can cut off his head at your 
leisure." 

He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk 
and began to run through it. "Sometimes," he said, 
"the charm is a whole phrase or even a sentence. 
I might, for instance, give you 'To make the' — No, 
that might not do. I think a single word would ,be 
best for dragons." 



8 Seeing Things at Night 

"A short word," suggested Gawaine. 

"It can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent. There 
isn't so much hurry as all that. Here's a splendid 
magic word: 'Rumplesnitz.' Do you think you can 
learn that?" 

Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to 
have the word well in hand. Again and again he inter- 
rupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I say 'Rumple- 
snitz' the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And al- 
ways the Headmaster replied, "If you only say 'Rum- 
plesnitz,' you are perfectly safe." 

Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his 
career. At daybreak the Headmaster saw him to the 
edge of the forest and pointed him to the direction in 
which he should proceed. About a mile away to the 
southwest a cloud of steam hovered over an open 
meadow in the woods and the Headmaster assured 
Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon. 
Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether 
it would be best to approach the dragon on the run 
as he did in his practice in the South Meadow or to 
walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all 
the way. 

The problem was decided for him. No sooner had 
he come to the fringe of the meadow than the dragon 
spied him and began to charge. It was a large dragon 
and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of the 
Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the 



The Fifty- first Dragon 9 

dragon charged it released huge clouds of hissing steam 
through its nostrils. It was almost as if a gigantic 
teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so 
fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time 
to say "Rumplesnitz" only once. As he said it, he 
swung his battle-ax and off popped the head of the 
dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier 
to kill a real dragon than a wooden one if only you 
said "Rumplesnitz." 

Gawaine brought the ears home and a small section 
of the tail. His school mates and the faculty made 
much of him, but the Headmaster wisely kept him from 
being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work. 
Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out 
to kill dragons. The Headmaster kept him at home 
when it rained, because he said the woods were damp 
and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want 
the boy to run needless risks. Few good days passed 
in which Gawaine failed to get a dragon. On one 
particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband 
and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he de- 
veloped a technique. Pupils who sometimes watched 
him from the hill-tops a long way off said that he often 
allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before 
he said " Rumplesnitz." He came to say it with a 
mocking sneer. Occasionally he did stunts. Once 
when an excursion party from London was watching 
him he went into action with his right hand tied be- 



io Seeing Things at Night 

hind his back. The dragon's head came off just as 
easily. 

As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the 
Headmaster found it impossible to keep him com- 
pletely in hand. He fell into the habit of stealing out 
at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the 
village tavern. It was after such a debauch that he 
rose a little before dawn one fine August morning and 
started out after his fiftieth dragon. His head was 
heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other 
respects as well, for he had adopted the somewhat 
vulgar practice of wearing his medals, ribbons and all, 
when he went out dragon hunting. The decorations 
began on his chest and ran all the way down to his 
abdomen. They must have weighed at least eight 
pounds. 

Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where 
he had killed the first one. It was a fair-sized dragon, 
but evidently an old one. Its face was wrinkled and 
Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a coun- 
tenance. Much to the lad's disgust, the monster re- 
fused to charge and Gawaine was obliged to walk to- 
ward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon 
regarded him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had 
heard of Gawaine. Even when the lad raised his 
battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that 
there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the 
head, for it had been informed that this hunter was 



The Fifty-first Dragon II 

protected by an enchantment. It merely waited, hop- 
ing something would turn up. Gawaine raised the 
battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had 
grown very pale and he trembled violently. The 
dragon suspected a trick. " What's the matter?" it 
asked, with false solicitude. 

"I've forgotten the magic word," stammered 
Gawaine. 

"What a pity," said the dragon. "So that was the 
secret. It doesn't seem quite sporting to me, all this 
magic stuff, you know. Not cricket, as we used to say 
when I was a little dragon; but after all, that's a mat- 
ter of opinion." 

Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the 
dragon's confidence rose immeasurably and it could not 
resist the temptation to show off a bit. 

"Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked. 
"What's the first letter of the magic word?" 

"It begins with an 'r,' " said Gawaine weakly. 

"Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us 
much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an 
epithet, do you think?" 

Gawaine could do no more than nod. 

"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reaction- 
ary Republican." 

Gawaine shook his head. 

"Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down 
to business. Will you surrender?" 



12 Seeing Things at Night 

With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mus- 
tered up enough courage to speak. 

"What will you do if I surrender?" he asked. 

"Why, I'll eat you/' said the dragon. 

"And if I don't surrender?" 

"I'll eat you just the same." 

"Then it doesn't make any difference, does it?" 
moaned Gawaine. 

"It does to me," said the dragon with a smile. "I'd 
rather you didn't surrender. You'd taste much better 
if you didn't." 

The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to 
ask "Why?" but the boy was too frightened to speak. 
At last the dragon had to give the explanation without 
his cue line. "You see," he said, "if you don't surren- 
der you'll taste better because you'll die game." 

This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's. 
By means of some such quip he was accustomed to 
paralyze his victims with laughter and then to destroy 
them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was, 
but laughter had no part in his helplessness. With 
the last word of the joke the dragon drew back his head 
and struck. In that second there flashed into the mind 
of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there 
was no time to say it. There was time only to strike 
and, without a word, Gawaine met the onrush of the 
dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and 
shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head 



The Fifty -first Dragon 13 

of the dragon flew away almost a hundred yards and 
landed in a thicket. 

Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after 
the death of the dragon. His mood was one of wonder. 
He was enormously puzzled. He cut off the ears of the 
monster almost in a trance. Again and again he 
thought to himself, "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz'!" He 
was sure of that and yet there was no question that he 
had killed the dragon. In fact, he had never killed 
one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head 
for anything like the same distance. Twenty-five 
yards was perhaps his best previous record. All the 
way back to the knight school he kept rumbling about 
in his mind seeking an explanation for what had oc- 
curred. He went to the Headmaster immediately and 
after closing the door told him what had happened. "I 
didn't say 'Rumplesnitz/ " he explained with great 
earnestness. 

The Headmaster laughed. "I'm glad you've found 
out," he said. "It makes you ever so much more of a 
hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that it 
was you who killed all these dragons and not that 
foolish little word ' Rumplesnitz.' " 

Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word 
after all?" he asked. 

"Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought 
to be too old for such foolishness. There isn't any 
such thing as a magic word." 



14 Seeing Things at Night 

"But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine. 
"You said it was magic and now you say it isn't." 

"It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the 
Headmaster, "but it was much more wonderful than 
that. The word gave you confidence. It took away 
your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have 
been killed the very first time. It was your battle-ax 
did the trick." 

Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude. 
He was obviously distressed by the explanation. He 
interrupted a long philosophic and ethical discourse by 
the Headmaster with, "If I hadn't of hit 'em all mighty 
hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me 
like a, like a — " He fumbled for a word. 

"Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster. 

"Like a egg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it 
many times. All through the evening meal people who 
sat near him heard him muttering, "Like a egg shell, 
like a egg shell." 

The next day was clear, but Gawaine did not get up 
at dawn. Indeed, it was almost noon when the Head- 
master found him cowering in bed, with the clothes 
pulled over his head. The principal called the Assist- 
ant Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged) 
the boy toward the forest. 

"He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more 
dragons under his belt," explained the Headmaster. 

The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It 



The Fifty-first Dragon 15 

would be a shame to stop such a fine run," he said. 
"Why, counting that one yesterday, he's killed fifty 
dragons." 

They pushed the boy into a thicket above which 
hung a meager cloud of steam. It was obviously quite 
a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come back that 
night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some 
weeks afterward brave spirits from the school explored 
the thicket, but they could find nothing to remind them 
of Gawaine except the metal parts of his medals. Even 
the ribbons had been devoured. 

The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of 
Pleasaunce agreed that it would be just as well not to 
tell the school how Gawaine had achieved his record and 
still less how he came to die. They held that it might 
have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly, 
Gawaine has lived in the memory of the school as its 
greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in leaving the build- 
ing to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs 
on the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons' 
ears are mounted upon the shield and underneath in 
gilt letters is "Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy," followed by 
the simple inscription, "He killed fifty dragons." The 
record has never been equaled. 



How To Be a Lion Tamer 

The Ways of the Circus is a decidedly readable 
book, rich in anecdotes of the life of circus folk and 
circus animals. The narrator is an old lion tamer and 
Harvey W. Root, who has done the actual writing, has 
managed to keep a decidedly naive quality in the talk 
as he sets it down. There is a delightful chapter, for 
instance, in which Conklin tells how he first became a 
lion tamer. By gradual process of promotion he had 
gone as far as an elephant, but his salary was still much 
lower than that of Charlie Forepaugh, the lion man. 
There were three lions with the circus, but Charlie 
never worked with more than one in the cage at the 
time. Conklin got the notion that an act with all the 
lions in action at once would be a sensational success. 
He was not sure that it could be done, as he had had 
no experience with lions. The only way to find out 
was to try. Accordingly Conklin sneaked into the 
menagerie alone, late at night, to ascertain whether 
or not lions lay along his natural bent. 

"The animals seemed somewhat surprised at being 
disturbed in the middle of the night," he says, "and 
began to pace rapidly up and down their cages. I paid 
no attention to this, but opened the door of each cage 
in succession and drove them out. Then I began as 

16 



How To Be a Lion Tamer 17 

sternly as I could to order them round and give them 
their cues. 

"Except, perhaps, for an unusual amount of snarl- 
ing, they did as well for me as for Charlie. I put 
them through their regular work, which took fifteen or 
twenty minutes, drove them back, and fastened them 
into their own cages and climbed down on to the floor 
from the performing cage, much elated with my suc- 
cess. I had proved to myself that I could handle 
lions." 

Conklin then goes on to tell how he gave a secret 
exhibition for the proprietor of the circus and con- 
vinced him of his skill. In fact, the proprietor prom- 
ised that he should become the lion tamer of the show 
as soon as Charlie Forepaugh's contract ran out. Con- 
klin goes on to say that he himself was very particular 
for the sake of safety not to let Charlie know of this 
arrangement. And in explaining his timidity, he writes, 
"He was a big fellow with a quick temper." 

This almost emboldens us to believe the old story of 
the lion tamer and his shrewish wife. Coming home 
late from a party, he feared to enter the house and so 
he went to the backyard and crept into the cage with 
the lions. There it was that his wife discovered him 
the next morning, sleeping with the lions, and she shook 
her fist and shouted through the bars, "you coward!" 

To be sure as Mr. Conklin tells it there seems to be 
no great trick in being a lion tamer. Take, for in- 



1 8 Seeing Things at Night 

stance, the familiar stunt in which a trainer puts his 
head into a lion's mouth and you will find upon close 
survey that it is nothing to worry about. "This never 
failed to make the crowd hold its breath, but it was 
not as risky as it seemed," says Conklin, "for with my 
hold on the lion's nose and jowl I could detect the 
slightest movement of his muscles and govern my ac- 
tions accordingly." Mr. Conklin does not develop the 
point, but we suppose that if he detected any intention 
on the lion's part of closing his mouth he would take 
his head out in order to make it easier for the animal. 

Mr. Conklin also corrects a number of misappre- 
hensions about lions which may be of use to some 
readers. Contrary to popular belief, you have nothing 
to worry about if any of your lions insist on walking 
up and down. "A lion that will walk round when you 
get in the cage with him is all right, as a general thing," 
explains Conklin, "but look out for the one that goes 
and lies down in a corner." 

To be sure, there is something just a little disturbing 
in the afterthought indicated in "as a general thing." 
Our luck is so bad that we wouldn't feel safe in a cage 
with a lion even if he ran up and down. In fact, we 
would be almost willing to wager that ours would be 
one of the unfortunate exceptions which didn't know 
the rule and so would do his bit toward providing it. 

In another respect the lion tamer is a little more 
specific about lions and therefore more helpful. "It is 



How To Be a Lion Tamer 19 

true, though," he adds, "that you should never let one 
get behind you if you can help it, though in many of the 
acts it is not possible to keep all of them in front of 
you all the time." We can understand this advice, 
though it is not altogether clear to us just what we 
would do if a lion tried to get behind us. Of course, 
we would tell him not to, but after that we should be 
somewhat at a loss. We have never believed in being 
rough with lions. Probably we would let him have his 
way just to avoid argument. As a matter of fact we 
would have no great objection to having all our lions 
behind us if only we could keep far enough in front. 

"A lion that growls frightfully and acts very fero- 
cious when you are outside the cage may be one of the 
easiest to handle and get work out of when once you 
are actually in the cage; and on the other hand, a lion 
that is mean and dangerous to do anything with in the 
cage may be exceptionally docile from the outside and 
allow you to pet him freely." 

This should go a long way toward solving the prob- 
lems of lion tamers. All you have to do before a per- 
formance is to make a test from outside the cage. Try 
to pat your lion and pull his ears. If he growls and 
bites your hand you will know at once that you may 
come in and go about your business with perfect safety. 
On the other hand, if he meets your caresses by rolling 
over on his back and purring it is up to you to call off 
the show or send for your understudy. 



20 Seeing Things at Night 

The unfortunate fate of such a substitute is described 
by Conklin with much detail and, we fear, a little 
relish. The man in question took Conklin's job when 
he struck for a raise in salary. Things went well 
enough during the first performance until the very end, 
and then it was the fault not of the lion but of the 
substitute, for the trainer was ignorant of one of the 
cues which had become a part of the act. 

"I had taught George to jump for me as I went out 
the door," writes Conklin. "It had been done by blow- 
ing on his nose and then jumping back as you would 
play with a dog. It always made a great hit with the 
crowd, who supposed it had seen a lion try to eat a 
man and that I had had a very narrow escape. I 
worked it this way: After I had finished the rest of my 
act I would get George all stirred up and growling. 
Then I would fire my pistol two or three times and 
jump out of the cage as quickly as I could. At the 
same time George would give a big lunge and come up 
against the door which I had just shut behind me. 
George had learned the trick so well that I frequently 
had to turn on him once or twice and work him farther 
back from the door before I dared attempt getting out." 

Unfortunately the substitute had missed all this part 
of the act. He started out of the cage and George 
jumped at him and the man was not prepared to dodge. 
The moral seems to be that nobody should covet an- 
other man's job, not even that of lion taming. 



How To Be a Lion Tamer 21 

Some readers we suppose will find Mr. Conklin's 
lion stories unwelcome because they may tend to take 
away their illusions. It is not to be denied that he has 
to some extent rubbed the gilt off the gingerbread by 
writing that the record for all the lions he has known 
consists of one substitute trainer and a cow. His whole 
attitude toward lions is contemptuous in its calm and so 
is the attitude of practically everybody else in the book 
with the exception of the cow and the substitute trainer. 
Even they suffered a little, at first, from overconfidence. 

On the night down in Philadelphia when Wallace, 
the big lion, escaped from his cage in winter quarters 
nobody grew excited. O'Brien, the owner of the show, 
did not even get up, but called through the door "Go 
git Conklin!" The preparations of the trainer were 
simple. First he got an iron bar and then he found 
the lion and hit him on the end of the nose. "After a 
few minutes/' he adds, "I had him safely locked in 
again." 

Lions, for all their air of authority, seem to be easily 
dominated. They're not so much wicked as weak. 
Anybody with a little firmness can twist them around 
a finger, possibly not the little finger, but any of the 
others. It is a great pity that lions should be like that. 
To be sure, the information ought not to come as a sur- 
prise to anybody who is familiar with the Bible. The 
condition we have mentioned has existed for a long 
time. As far as we know, Daniel had not so much as 



22 Seeing Things at Night 

an iron bar when he went into the den. He overawed 
the lions with nothing more than faith. 

Perhaps it is not quite fair to go on as if lions were 
the only living creatures in all the world who are 
swayed and cowed by firmness and authority. The 
same weakness may be found now and then among 
men. All too many of us if hit on the nose with iron 
bars, either real ones or symbols, do little more than 
lions in similar circumstances. We may growl and 
roar a little, but we do not show resentment in any 
efficient way. And like the lions, we are singularly 
stupid in not making working alliances with our fellows 
against the man with the iron bar. By and by we 
begin to go through the hoops as if the procedure were 
inevitable. Having made a protest we feel that our 
duty is done. 

It is a great pity. Lions ought to know better. The 
man who stares you in the eye and squeezes hard in a 
handshake may come to the bad end which you wish 
him, but it is unlikely that he will ever be eaten by 
lions. Something else must be devised for him. Even 
outside the circus he is likely to go far. Anybody who 
can shake a little personality can be ringmaster in this 
world. And we, all of us who have none, do nothing 
about it except to obey him. Camels we can swallow 
easily enough, but we strain at the natty dresser. 

Still we did manage to find a few bits of information 
in The Ways of the Circus which were brand new to 



How To Be a Lion Tamer 23 

us. If, for instance, a rhinoceros escaped from his 
cage just what would you do to get him back again? 
That is, if he were the sort of rhinoceros you wanted 
back. At first glance it seems rather a problem, but 
any reader of Mr. Conklin's book could arrange it for 
you without difficulty. Nothing is needed but carrots 
and a stout heart. The carrots you scatter profusely 
about the floor of the cage, and when the rhinoceros 
returns to get them you slam down the door, and there 
he is. 



H. G. Wells of England 

H. G. Wells in his Outline of History seldom seems 
just an Englishman. He fights his battles and makes 
most of his judgments alone and generally in defiance 
of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not bold 
enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. 
The sight of the terrible little Corsican peeping over 
the edge of the thirty-eighth chapter sends Wells scur- 
rying from his solitude into the center of a British 
square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad 
his nurse told him that if he did not eat his mush or go 
to bed, or perform some other necessary function in the 
daily life of a child, Old Bony would get him. And 
Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by 
pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated 
and remarks that it was pretty lucky for him that he 
lost Trafalgar and never got to England, where troops 
would have made short work of him. 

Nelson, Wells holds, was just as great a figure in his 
own specialty as Napoleon in his, but if so it seems a 
pity that he did not rise to Wellsian heights of strategy 
and lose Trafalgar so that Napoleon might land and be 
defeated by British pluck and skill. Then, indeed, 
might Waterloo have been won upon the cricket fields 
of Eton. 

24 



H. G. Wells of England 2$ 

Not only does Wells insist on regarding Napoleon 
through national lenses but through moral ones also. 
Speaking of his accession as First Consul, Wells writes: 
"Now surely here was opportunity such as never came 
to man before. Here was a position in which a man 
might well bow himself in fear of himself, and search 
his heart and serve God and man to the utmost." 

That, of course, was not Napoleon's intent. His 
performance must be judged by his purpose, and it 
seems to us that Wells doesn't half appreciate how 
brilliant was the stunt which Napoleon achieved. "He 
tried to do the impossible and did it." Man was no 
better for him and neither was God, but he remains 
still the great bogy man of Europe, a bogy great 
enough to have frightened Mr. Wells and marked him. 
Here was a man who took life and made it theatrical. 
It was an achievement in popular aesthetics, if nothing 
else, but Wells doesn't care about aesthetics. Perhaps 
even a moral might be extracted from the life of Na- 
poleon. He proved the magic quality of personality 
and the inspiration of gesture. Some day the same 
methods may be used to better advantage. 

The institution of the Legion of Honor Wells calls 
"A scheme for decorating Frenchmen with bits of rib- 
bon which was admirably calculated to divert ambi- 
tious men from subversive proceedings." But these 
same bits of ribbon and the red and green ones of the 
Croix de Guerre and the yellow and green of the 



26 Seeing Things at Night 

Medaille Militaire were later to save France from the 
onrush of the Germans. Without decorations, without 
phrases and without the brilliant and effective theatri- 
cal oratory of French officers, from marshals to sub- 
lieutenants, France would have lost the great war. 
Everybody who saw the French army in, action realized 
that its morale was maintained during the worst days 
by colored ribbons and florid speeches. Even the stern 
and taciturn Pershing learned the lesson, and before 
he had been in France three months he was about mak- 
ing speeches to wounded men in which he told them 
that he wished that he, too, were lying in hospital with 
all their glory. Personally, it never seemed to me that 
Pershing actually convinced any wounded doughboy 
of his enthusiasm for such a change, but he did not use 
the gesture with much skill. He lacked the Napoleonic 
tradition. 

Another American officer, a younger one, said, "If 
I ever have anything to do with West Point I'm going 
to copy these Frenchmen. They do it naturally, but 
weVe got to learn. I'm going to introduce a course in 
practical theatricalism. Now, if I were a general, as 
soon as I heard of some little trench raid in which 
Private Smith distinguished himself I'd send a staff offi- 
cer down on the sly to find out what Smith looked like. 
Then I'd inspect that particular organization and when 
I got to Smith my aide would nudge me and I'd turn, 



H. G. Wells of England 27 

as if instinctively, and say, 'Isn't that Private Smith 
who distinguished himself on the evening of January 
18 at 8 o'clock? I want to shake your hand, Smith.' 
Why, man, the French army has been living and 
breathing on stuff like that for the last two years." 

It is an easy matter to satirize the heroic and theatri- 
cal gesture. The French themselves did it. Once in 
the Chamber of Deputies, late in the war, a Radical 
member, who didn't care much for the war, anyway, 
and still less for the Cabinet, arose and said: "This 
morning as I was walking in the streets of Paris a 
little before dawn I saw three camions headed for the 
front, and I stopped the first driver and said, 'Ah, I 
am overjoyed to see that at last the ministry is awake 
to the needs of our brave poilus and is sending supplies 
to the front. What is it that you carry — ammunition, 
clothing, food?' But the driver shook his head and 
said, 'No; Croix de Guerre.' " 

But the satire does not cut too deeply, for Croix de 
Guerre played just as important a part in winning the 
war as food or ammunition or clothing. I heard a 
French colonel once cry to a crowd of prisoners re- 
turned from Germany, broken and ill: "Now, let us 
hear you shout that which it has been so long forbidden 
to you to say, 'Vive la France ! ' " And as he spoke 
his arm shot up into the air and his voice rang like a 
trumpet call, and everybody within sound of the man 



28 Seeing Things at Night 

* 
straightened up and thrilled as if he had just heard of 

a great victory. It was fine art for all the fact that it 

was probably also sincere. 

No, when Napoleon had himself crowned in Notre 

Dame it was not, as Wells says, "Just a ridiculous 

scene." Napoleon realized that a play can be staged 

in a cathedral or upon a battlefield just as well as in a 

theater, and that man, who may come in time to be 

the superman of whom Wells dreams is still a little 

boy sitting in the gallery, ready to applaud and to 

shout for^any dressed-up person who knows how to 

walk to the center of the stage and hold it. 



Promises and Contracts and Clocks 

"I am one of those people," says the flapper in 
Beauty and Mary Blair, "to whom life is a very great 
puzzle. So many people seem to get used to living, 
but I don't. I can't seem to get up any really satis- 
factory philosophy or find anybody or anything to help 
me about it. I want everything, little or big, fixed up in 
mind before I can proceed. 

"Even as a very small child I always wanted my 
plans made in advance. Once, when mother had a bad 
sick headache, I sat on the edge of her bed and begged 
her to tell me if she thought she was going to die, so if 
she was I could plan to go and live with my Aunt Mar- 
garet. I was an odious infant, but all the same, I really 
wanted to know, and that's the way I am to this day! 
I want to know what the probabilities are, in order to 
act accordingly." 

And without doubt she was odious, but only in the 
same way that practically everybody else is odious, for 
we live in a world which is governed by promises and 
contracts and clocks. If there actually is any such 
thing as free will, aren't we the idiots to fetter it! The 
chances of doing things on impulse are being continu- 
ally diminished. There are points in the city now 

29 



3<3 Seeing Things at Night 

where it is not possible to cross the street without the 
permission of the policeman. 

"Stop," "Go," "Keep Off the Grass," "No Trespass- 
ing," "Beware of the Dog," "Watch Your Hat and 
Overcoat," "Positively No Checks Cashed," "Do Not 
Feed or Annoy the Animals" — how can a free and ad- 
venturous soul survive in such a world? Don Marquis 
has celebrated the exploit of one brave rebel, we think 
it was Fothergil Finch, who strode into the monkey 
house and crying "Down with the tyranny of the 
capitalist system," or words to that effect, threw a pea- 
nut into the baboon's cage. We know an even bolder 
soul who makes a point of never watching his hat and 
overcoat in direct defiance of the edict, but he says 
that the world has become so cowed by rules that noth- 
ing ever happens. 

Even the usual avenues of escape have been beset 
with barbed wire. There was liquor, for instance. 
There still is, but the prohibitionists have been devil- 
ishly wise. By arranging that it shall be ladled out by 
prescriptions, no matter how lavish, they have reduced 
drinking to the prosaic level of premeditation along 
with all the other activities of the world. Things have 
come to such a pass that drinking has now been re- 
stricted to men with real executive ability. It is no 
longer the solace of the irresponsible, but the reward 
of foresight. 

Once the easy escape from dull and set routine lay 



Promises and Contracts and Clocks 31 

in stepping on board a steamer and sailing for distant 
and purple shores. They are not so purple any more. 
No traveler can feel much like a free and footloose ad- 
venturer after he has spent two weeks in conference 
with the State Department, presented a certificate con- 
firming the fact of his birth, gathered together the re- 
ceipts of his income tax payments and obtained a letter 
from his pastor. Even though he go to the ends of the 
earth the adventurer travels only by the express and 
engraved permission of the United States government. 
Oceans and mountain ranges cannot alter the fact that 
he is on a leash. Of course, to free souls the whole 
system is monstrous. The fact that a man suddenly 
feels a desire to go to Greece on some rainy Tuesday 
afternoon is no sign at all that he will still want to go 
two weeks come Wednesday. The only proper proce- 
dure for the rebel is to obtain passports for a number 
of places for which he has not the slightest inclination 
on the hope that some day or other through a sudden 
change of wind he may be struck with yearning. 

Train journeys are almost as bad as sea voyages. 
Go into any railroad station in town and ask the man 
at the window for a ticket and he will invariably in- 
quire "Where do you want to go?" No provision is 
made for the casual traveler without a destination. 
The query "What trains have you got?" meets with 
scant courtesy. Our own system is to shop for trains. 
It is possible to walk up and down in front of the gates 



32 Seeing Things at Night 

and look over the samples before making a selection, 
but our practice is to take the first one. To be sure 
this has let us into going to a good many places to 
which we didn't want to go, but it has also saved us 
from visiting any number of others to which we ought 
to go. Moreover, confidentially, we have one trick by 
which we slash through the red tape of railroad preci- 
sion. Only last Thursday we told the man with a great 
show of determination that we wanted to go to Pough- 
keepsie and bought a ticket for that place. Then, 
when the conductor wasn't looking we slipped off at 
Tarry town. 

Going to the theater, getting married or divorced 
are all carried on under the same objectionable condi- 
tions. "Seats eight weeks in advance" say the adver- 
tisements of some of the popular shows and others. 
How can anybody possibly want to do something eight 
weeks in advance? It makes taking in a matinee a 
matter as dignified to all intents and purposes as writ- 
ing a will or doing some other service for posterity. 

There are in this country statesmen who worry from 
time to time that people do not marry as young as they 
used to, if at all. How can it be expected that they 
will? The life force is powerful and may prevail, but 
nature never had within its intent a license, witnesses, 
bridesmaids, a plain gold ring, a contract with the 
caterer, a bargain with the printer and an engagement 
with the minister. 



Alcoholic Liquors 

"The moment, now, had arrived for a Daiquiri," 
writes Joseph Hergesheimer in his San Cristobal de la 
Habana. "Seated near the cool drip of the fountain, 
where a slight stir of air seemed to ruffle the fringed 
mantone of a bronze dancing Andalusian girl, I lingered 
over the frigid mixture of Don Bacardi, sugar and a 
fresh, vivid green lime. 

"It was a delicate compound, not so good as I was 
to discover later at the Telegrafo, but still a revelation, 
and I was devoutly thankful to be sitting at that hour 
in the Inglaterra with such a drink. It elevated my 
contentment to an even higher pitch, and, with a de- 
tached amusement, I recalled the fact that farther 
north prohibition was now in effect. Unquestionably 
the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it 
held in its shallow glass bowl slightly incrusted with 
undissolved sugar the power of a contemptuous indif- 
ference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; 
obliterating both memory and to-morrow, it gave the 
heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momen- 
tarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal fears." 

We wonder what they put into Mr. Hergesheimer 's 
Daiquiri. It seems to us a rather optimistic and ro- 
mantic account of the effect of a single cocktail. One 

33 



34 Seeing Things at Night 

of the reasons why we were reconciled to prohibition 
was the fact that we invariably felt cheated whenever 
we read any loving essay about rum. In the theater, 
too, again and again we saw some character raise a 
glass to his lips and immediately begin to sing about 
young love in May if he happened to be the hero, or 
fall down a flight of steps if he were cast as the low 
comedian. We tried earnestly enough, but these ex- 
periences were never duplicated for us. No songs 
came to our lips, nor comic tumbles to our feet. Nor 
did we ever participate in Mr. Hergesheimer's "con- 
temptuous indifference to fate." It was not for us in 
one cocktail; no, not in many. 

Occasionally, it was possible to reach a stage where 
we became acutely conscious of the fact that Armenians 
were being massacred and that Ireland was not yet free. 
And later we have known a very persuasive drowsiness. 
But as for contempt and a feeling of superiority and 
a freedom from the eternal fears, we never found the 
right bottle. There was none which opened for us any 
door of adventure. Once, we remember, while on our 
way from the office to Seventy-second Street, we rode 
in the subway to Van Cortlandt Park and, upon being 
told about it, traveled back to Atlantic Avenue. It 
was a long ride for a nickel, but it hardly satisfied us 
as authentic adventure. 

Even the romantic stories of our friends generally 
seem to us inadequate. Only to-day A. W. said, "You 



Alcoholic Liquors 35 

should have come to the party. We played a new 
game called 'adverbs.' You send somebody out of 
the room and choose an adverb, and when she comes 
back you've got to answer all the questions in the spirit 
of that adverb. You know rudely, quickly, cryptically, 
or anything like that. And then Art did a burlesque 
of the second act of Samson and Delilah and Elaine 
passed out completely, and every time anybody woke 
her up she'd say, 'Call me a black and white ambu- 
lance.' You had ought to have come." 

We couldn't have added anything to that party. 
When it came our turn to answer the questions in the 
adverb game it would be just our luck to have the 
chosen word "gracefully" or "seductively" or some- 
thing like that, and probably the burlesque was no good 
anyhow unless one could get into the spirit of the thing. 
That is our traditional failure. Right at the begin- 
ning of a party we realize that it is our duty to get gay 
and put ice down people's backs and all that, and it 
terrifies us. Whenever a host says " Here, drink some 
more Scotch and liven up" we have the same sinking 
feeling that we used to get when one of our former 
city editors wrote in the assignment book opposite our 
name: "Go up to the zoo and write me a funny story." 

The whole trouble with life so far is that too much 
of it falls into assignments. We're not even content 
to let our holidays just happen. Instead we mark them 
down on a calendar, and there they stay as fixed and 



36 Seeing Things at Night 

set as an execution day. There are times, for instance, 
when we feel like turning over a new leaf and leading 
a better life and giving up cigarettes, but when we look 
at the calendar it isn't New Year's at all, but Fourth 
of July, and so nothing can be done about it. Colum- 
bus Day or Washington's Birthday generally comes 
just about the time we've worked up an enthusiasm for 
Lincoln, which has to go to waste, and the only strong 
impulse we ever had to go out and cut loose was spoiled 
because we noticed that everybody we met was wear- 
ing a white flower in his buttonhole and we remembered 
that it was Mother's Day. There are even times when 
we don't want to play cards or travel on railroad trains 
or read the newspapers or go to the movies, but these 
times never synchronize with Sunday. 

When we first took up drinking we hoped that this 
would be one of the avenues of escape from schedule 
and assignment, but it didn't work out. Even here 
there were preliminaries and premeditation. First of 
all, it was necessary to cultivate a taste for the stuff, 
but that was only a beginning. There were still cere- 
monies to be complied with. Drunkenness never just 
descended on anybody like thunderstorm, rain or in- 
spiration. It was not possible to go to sleep sober 
and wake up and find that somehow or other you had 
become intoxicated during the night. Always an act 
of will was required. A fixed determination, "I'm go- 
ing to get drunk," must first be set, and then the rum 



Alcoholic Liquors 37 

has to be ordered and poured out and consumed pretty 
regularly. In fact, we never could look at a bottle 
without feeling that the label probably bore the express 
direction, "Take ten times every hour until relief is 
obtained." Even before the Volstead act liquor was 
spiritually a prescription rather than a beverage. 

We never had the strength of character to get any 
good out of it. It's a fallacy, of course, to think of a 
chronic drunkard or a chronic anything as a person 
of weak will. Indeed, as a matter of fact, his will is so 
strong that he has been able to marshal all his ener- 
gies into one channel and to make himself thereby 
a specialist. In all our life we have never met but two 
determined men. One took a cold bath every morn- 
ing and the other got drunk every night. 



Some of My Best Friends Are Yale Men 

" Oh, Harvard was old Harvard when Yale was but a pup, 
" And Harvard will be Harvard still when Yale has all gone 

up, 
" And if any Eli " 

This is about as far as the old song should be car- 
ried. Perhaps it is too far. Our plea to-day is for 
something of abatement in the intensity of the rivalry 
between Harvard and Yale. To be sure we realize 
that the plea has been made before unsuccessfully by 
mightier men. Indeed it was Charles W. Eliot him- 
self, president of Harvard, who rebuked the students 
when first they began to sing, "Three cheers for Har- 
vard and down with Yale." This, he said, seemed 
to him hardly a proper spirit. He suggested an amend- 
ment so that the song might go, "Three cheers for Har- 
vard and one for Yale." Such seventy-five percent loy- 
alty was rejected. Yale must continue to do its own 
cheering. 

Naturally, it is not to be expected that Yale and 
Harvard men should meet on terms of perfect amity 
immediately and that the old bitterness should dis- 
appear within the time of our own generation. Such 
a miracle is beyond the scope of our intention. Too 
much has happened. Just what it was that Yale orig- 

38 



Some Best Friends Are Yale Men 39 

inally did to Harvard we don't profess to know. It 
was enough we suppose to justify the trial of the issue 
by combat four times a year in the major sports. Curi- 
ously enough, for a good many years Yale seemed to 
grow more and more right if judged in the light of 
these tests. But the truth is mighty and shall prevail 
and the righteousness of Harvard's cause began to be 
apparent with the coming of Percy Haughton. God, 
as some cynic has said, is always on the side which 
has the best football coach. 

Our suggestion is that whatever deep wrong Yale 
once committed against Harvard, a process of diminu- 
tion of feeling should be allowed to set in. After all, 
can't the men of Cambridge be broadminded about 
these things and remember that nothing within the 
power of Yale could possibly hurt Harvard very much? 
Even in the days when the blue elevens were winning 
with great regularity there should have been consola- 
tion enough in the thought that Harvard's Greek de- 
partment still held the edge. Seemingly nobody ever 
thought of that. In the 1906 game a Harvard half- 
back named Nichols was sent in late in the game while 
the score was still a tie. On practically the first play 
he dropped a punt which led directly to a Yale touch- 
down and victory. 

Throughout the rest of his university career he was 
known in college as "the man who dropped the punt." 
When his brother entered Harvard two years later he 



4-0 Seeing Things at Night 

was promptly christened, and known for his next four 
years, as "the brother of the man who dropped the 
punt." 

Isn't this a little excessive? It seems so to us, but 
the emphasis has not yet shifted. Only a month or 
so ago we were talking in New Haven before an or- 
ganization of Yale graduates upon a subject so un- 
partisan as the American drama — though to be sure 
Harvard has turned out ten playwrights of note to 
every one from Yale — and somehow or other the talk 
drifted around to football. In pleading for less in- 
tensity of football feeling we mentioned the man who 
dropped the punt and his brother and told how Yale 
had recovered the fatal fumble on Harvard's nineteen- 
yard line. Then, with the intention of being jocose, we 
remarked, "The Yale eleven with characteristic bulldog 
grit and courage carried the ball over the line." To 
our horror and amazement the audience immediately 
broke into applause and long cheers. 

Some of my best friends are Yale men and there 
is no basis for the common Harvard assumption that 
graduates of New Haven's leading university are of 
necessity inferior to the breed of Cambridge. Still, 
there is, perhaps, just a shade of difference in the 
keenness of perception for wit. Practically all the Har- 
vard anecdotes about Yale which we know are pointed 
and sprightly, while Yale is content with such infe- 
rior and tasteless jibes as the falsetto imitation which 



Some Best Friends Are Yale Men 41 

begins "Fiercely fellows, sift through." Even the au- 
dience of graduates to which we referred was singu- 
larly cold to the anecdote about the difference in tra- 
ditions which prevails at New Haven and at Cam- 
bridge. "When a Yale man is sick, the authorities 
immediately assume that he is drunk. When a Har- 
vard man is drunk, the authorities assume that he is 
sick." 

Nor were we successful in retelling the stirring ap- 
peal of a well-known organizer who was seeking to 
consolidate various alumni bodies into a vast unified 
employment agency for college men. "There should 
be," he cried, "one great clearing house. Then when 
somebody came for a man to tutor his children we could 
send him a Harvard man and if he needed somebody 
to help with the furnace, we'd have a Yale graduate 
for him." 

Joking with undergraduates we found still more dis- 
astrous. After the last Harvard- Yale football game 
— score Harvard 9, Yale o, which doesn't begin to 
indicate the margin of superiority of the winning team 
— we wrote an article of humorous intent for a New 
York newspaper. Naturally our job as a reporter pre- 
vented us from being partisan in our account of the 
game. Accordingly, in a temperate and fairminded 
spirit, we set down the fact that, through the con- 
nivance of the New York press, Yale has become a 
professional underdog and that any Harvard victory 



42 Seeing Things at Night 

in which the score is less than forty-two to nothing 
is promptly hailed as a moral victory for Yale. 

Developing this news angle for a few paragraphs, 
we eventually came to the unfortunate fist fight be- 
tween Kempton of Yale and Gaston of Harvard which 
led to both men being put out of the game. It was 
our bad luck to see nothing but the last half second of 
the encounter. As a truthful reporter we made this 
admission but naturally went on to add, "Of course, 
we assume that Kempton started it." For weeks we 
continued to receive letters from Yale undergraduates 
beginning, "My attention has been called to your ar- 
ticle" and continuing to ask with great violence how 
a reporter could possibly tell who started a fight with- 
out seeing the beginning of it. Some letters of like 
import were from Princeton men. 

Princeton is always quick to rally to the defense of 
Yale against Harvard. This suggests a possibly com- 
mon meeting ground for Harvard and Yale. Of course, 
they can hardly meet on the basis of a common lan- 
guage for the speech of Yale is quite alien. For in- 
stance, they call their "yard" a "campus." Also, there 
are obvious reasons why they cannot meet as equal 
members in the fellowship of educated men. Since this 
is a nonpartisan article designed to promote good feel- 
ing it will probably be just as well not to go into this. 
Though football is the chief interest at New Haven, 
Yale men often display a surprising sensitiveness to at- 



Some Best Friends Are Yale Men 43 

tacks on the scholarship of their local archeologists. 
Nor will religion do as a unifier. Yale is evangelical 
and prays between the halves, while Harvard is mostly- 
agnostic, if it isn't Unitarian. No, just one great cause 
can be discovered in which Harvard men and Yale men 
can stand shoulder to shoulder and lift their voices in 
a common cause. Each year some public spirited citi- 
zen ought to hire Madison Square Garden and turn it 
over to all graduates and undergraduates of Harvard 
and of Yale for a great get-together meeting in which 
past differences should be forgotten in one deep and 
full throated shout of "To Hell with Princeton !" 



Bacillus and Circumstance 

It is evening in the home of Peter J. Cottontail. 
The scene is a conventional parlor of a rabbit family 
of the upper middle class. About the room there is 
the sort of furniture a well-to-do rabbit would have, 
and on the shelves the books you would naturally ex- 
pect. Leaves of Grass is there, of course; possibly 
Cabbages and Kings, and perhaps a volume or two of 
The Winning of the West, with a congratulatory in- 
scription from the author. The walls have one or two 
good prints of hunting scenes and an excellent litho- 
graphic likeness of Thomas Malthus, but most of the 
space is given over to photographs of the family. 

In the center of the room is a small square table, 
the surface of which is covered with figures ranged in 
curious patterns such as 2 X 5 = 10, and even so radi- 
cal an arrangement as 7 X 8 — 56. At the rise of the 
curtain Peter J. Cottontail is discovered seated in 
an easy chair reading the current edition of The New 
York Evening Post. He is middle-aged and wears 
somewhat ill fitting brown fur, tinged with gray, and 
horn-rimmed spectacles. He looks a little like Lloyd 
George. As a matter of fact, his grandfather was 
Welsh. The actor should convey to the audience by 
means of pantomime that he has made more than a 
thousand dollars that afternoon by selling Amalga- 

44 



Bacillus and Circumstance 45 

mated Cabbage short, and that there will be a tidy 
surplus for himself even after he has fulfilled his prom- 
ise to make up the deficit incurred by the charity hop 
of the Bone Dry Prohibition Union. Now and again 
he smiles and pats his stomach complacently. It is 
essential that the actor should indicate beyond the 
peradventure of a doubt that Peter J. Cottontail has 
never touched spirituous or malt liquors or anything 
containing more than two per cent of alcohol per fluid 
ounce. 

As P. J. Cottontail peruses his paper the ceiling of 
the room is suddenly plucked aside and two hands are 
thrust into the parlor. One of the hands seizes Mr. 
Cottontail, and the other hand, which holds a hypoder- 
mic needle, stabs the helpless householder and injects 
into his veins the contents of the needle. It is a fluid 
gray and forbidding. There is no sound unless the 
actor who plays Cottontail chooses to squeak just once. 

Here the curtain descends. It rises again almost 
immediately, but five days are supposed to have 
elapsed. Mr. Cottontail is again seated in the center 
of the room, and he is again reading The Evening Post. 
The property man should take pains to see that the 
paper shall be dated five days later than the one used 
in the prologue. It might also be well to change the 
headline from "Submarine Crisis Acute" to "Subma- 
rine Crisis Still Acute." It is also to be noted that 
on this occasion Mr. Cottontail has removed his right 



46 Seeing Things at Night 

shoe in favor of a large, roomy slipper. On the oppo- 
site side of the table sits Mrs. Cottontail. She is 
middle-aged but comely. A strong-minded female, one 
would say, with a will of her own, but rather in awe 
of the ability and more particularly the virtue of Mr. 
Cottontail. Yet Mr. Cottontail is evidently in ill 
humor this evening. He takes no pleasure in his pa- 
per, but fidgets uneasily. At last he speaks with great 
irritation. 

Mr. Cottontail — Is that doctor ever coming? 

Mrs. Cottontail — I left word at Doctor Cony's 
house that you were in a good deal of pain, and that 
he should come around the minute he got home. ( The 
door bell rings.) Here he is now. I'll send him up. 
{She goes out the door, and a jew moments later there 
enters Dr. Charles Cony. He is a distinguished and 
forceful physician, but a meager little body for all that. 
He carries a black bag.) 

Dr. Cony {removing his gloves and opening the bag) 
— Sorry I couldn't get here any sooner, but I've been 
on the go all day. An obstetrician gets mighty liftle 
rest hereabouts, I can tell you. Well, now, Mr. Cotton- 
tail, what can I do for you? What seems to be the 
trouble? 

Cottontail {pointing to the open door, and lifting 
one finger to his mouth) — Shush! 

Dr. Cony — Really! {The physician crosses the 
room in one hop and closes the door.) 



Bacillus and Circumstance 47 

Cottontail — The pain's in my foot. My big toe, 
I think, but that's not what worries me — 

Dr. Cony (breaking in) — Pains worse at night than 
it does during the daytime, doesn't it? Throbs a bit 
right now, hey? 

Cottontail— Yes, it does, but that isn't the trou- 
ble. 

Dr. Cony— That's trouble enough. I'll try to have 
you loping around again in a month or so. 

Cottontail — But there's more than the pain. It's 
the worry. I haven't told a soul. I thought at first 
it might be a nightmare. 

Dr. Cony — Dreams, eh? Very significant, some- 
times, but we'll get to them later. 

Cottontail — But I'm afraid it wasn't a dream. 

Doctor — What wasn't a dream? 

Cottontail — Last Tuesday evening I was sitting 
in this room, quietly reading The Evening Post, when 
suddenly something tore the ceiling away, and down 
from above there came ten horrible pink tentacles and 
seized me in an iron grasp. Then something stabbed 
me with some sharp instrument. I was too frightened 
to move for several minutes, but when I looked up the 
ceiling was back in place as if nothing had touched it. 
I felt around for the wound, but the only thing I could 
find was a tiny scratch that seemed so small I might 
have had it some time without noticing it. I couldn't 
be sure it was a wound. In fact, I tried to make my- 



48 Seeing Things at Night 

self believe that the whole thing was all a dream, until 
I was taken sick to-night. Now I'm afraid that the 
sword, or whatever it was that stabbed me, must have 
been poisoned. 

Dr. Cony {sharply) — Let me look at your tongue. 
{Cottontail complies.) Seems all right. Hold out your 
hands. Spread your fingers. {He studies the patient 
for a moment.) Nothing much the matter there. 
{Producing pen and paper.) If it was only March now 
I'd know what to say. Let's see what we can find out 
about hereditary influence. Father and mother liv- 
ing? 

Cottontail — I had no father or mother. I came 
out of a trick hat in a vaudeville act. 

Dr. Cony — That makes it a little more difficult, 
doesn't it? Do you happen to remember what sort 
of a hat? 

Cottontail {a little proudly) — It was quite a high 
hat. 

Dr. Cony — Yes, it would be. What color? 

Cottontail — Black and shiny. 

Dr. Cony — That seems normal enough. I'm afraid 
there's nothing significant there. {Anxiously.) No 
fixed delusions? You don't think you're Napoleon or 
the White Rabbit or anything like that, do you? Do 
you feel like growling or biting anybody? 

Cottontail — Of course not. There's nothing the 
matter with my brain. 



Bacillus and Circumstance 49 

Dr. Cony — Perhaps you went to sleep and dreamed 
it all. 

Cottontail — No, I distinctly saw the ceiling open 
and I felt the stab very sharply. I couldn't possibly 
have been asleep. I was reading a most interesting 
dramatic review in The Evening Post. 

Dr. Cony — But you weren't stabbed in the big toe, 
now, were you? 

Cottontail — Well, no. 

Dr. Cony — And you will admit that the ceiling's 
just the same as it ever was? 

Cottontail — It looks the same from here. I 
haven't called any workmen in yet to examine it. 

Dr. Cony — Take my advice and don't. Just let's 
keep the matter between ourselves and forget it. I'm 
afraid you've been working too hard. Drop your busi- 
ness. Do a little light reading, and after a bit maybe 
I'd like to have you go to a show. Something with 
songs and bunny-hugging and jokes and chorus girls. 
None of this birth control stuff. I don't see how any 
self-respecting rabbit could go to a play like the one 
I saw last night. (He goes to his instrument case and 
produces a stethoscope.) 

Dr. Cony — Have you had your heart examined 
lately? 

Cottontail (visibly nervous) — No. 

Dr. Cony — Any shortness of breath or palpitation? 

Cottontail— I don't think so. 



50 Seeing Things at Night 

Dr. Cony — If that's a vest you have on, take it off. 
There, now. (He stands in front of Cottontail with 
his stethoscope poised in the air. Cottontail is trem- 
bling. Dr. Cony allows the hand holding the stetho- 
scope to drop to his side and remarks provocatively) , 
I'll bet you Maranville doesn't hit .250 this season. 

Cottontail (amazed) — Really, sir, I never bet. 
No, never. I don't know what you are talking about, 
anyway. 

Dr. Cony— That's all right, that's all right. Don't 
agitate yourself. Just a little professional trick. I 
wanted to calm you down. Now (he makes a hurried 
examination), Mr. Cottontail, I don't want you to run. 
I don't want you to climb stairs. Avoid excitement and 
don't butter your parsnips. Fine words are just as 
good, no matter what anybody may tell you, and they 
don't create fatty tissue. Of course, you've got to have 
some exercise. You might play a little golf. Say, 
about three holes a day. 

Cottontail (sadly) — Three holes? 

Dr. Cony — Yes, that will be enough. 

Cottontail (musing) — It's a little tough, doctor. 
I can still remember the day I won my "H" at dear old 
Hassenpfeffer in the 'cross-country run. I had the 
lungs and the legs then. Even now I can feel the wind 
on my face as I came across the meadow and up that 
last, long hill. They were cheering for me to come on. 
I can tell you I just leaped along. It was nothing at 



Bacillus and Circumstance 51 

all for me. If I'd sprinted just a bit sooner I could 
have been first in a hop. Anyhow, I was second. There 
was nobody ahead of me but the Tortoise. {Cheer- 
lessly) Three holes of golf a day! 

Dr. Cony — Come, come, sir, be a rabbit. There's 
no cheating nature, you know. You had your fun, and 
now you must pay. 

Cottontail — What's the matter with me? 

Dr. Cony — Plain, old-fashioned gout. 

Cottontail — What does that come from? 

Dr. Cony (with evident relish) — From too much ale 
or porter or claret or burgundy or champagne or sherry 
or Rhine Wine or Clover Clubs or Piper Heidsieck or 
brandy or Bronxes or absinthe or stingers, but the 
worst of all and the best of all is port wine. 

Cottontail (horrified) — You mean it comes from 
drinking? 

Dr. Cony — In all my twenty-five years of profes- 
sional practice I have never known a case of gout with- 
out antecedent alcoholism. 

Cottontail (much relieved) — Well, then, it can't 
be gout. I've never taken a drink in my life. 

Dr. Cony — In all my twenty-five years of profes- 
sional experience I've never made an incorrect diagno- 
sis. It is gout. 

Cottontail — But I'm president of the Bone Dry 
Prohibition Union. 

Dr. Cony — The more shame to you, sir. 



52 Seeing Things at Night 

Cottontail — What shall I do? 

Dr. Cony — Obey my instructions implicitly. A 
good many doctors will tell you that they can't cure 
gout. Undoubtedly they are right. They can't. But 
I can. Only you simply must stop drinking. Cut- 
ting down and tapering of! to ten or twelve drinks a 
day won't do. You must stop absolutely. No liquor 
at all. Do you understand? Not a drop, sir. 

Cottontail {his nose violently palpitating with 
emotion) — I never took a drink in my life. I'm presi- 
dent of the Bone Dry Prohibition Union. I was Just 
sitting quietly reading The Evening Post — 

Dr. Cony — Save that story for your bone-dry 
friends. I have nothing to do with your past life. I'm 
not judging you. It's nature that says the alcoholic 
must pay and pay and pay. I'm only concerned now 
with the present and the future, and the present is that 
you're suffering from alcoholism manifested in gout, 
and the future is that you'll die if you don't stop drink- 
ing. 

Cottontail — I tell you I promised my Sunday 
school teacher when I was a boy that I would always 
be a Little Light Bearer, and that I would never take 
a drink if I lived to be a hundred. 

Dr. Cony — Don't worry, you won't live that long, 
and don't take on so. You're not the first one that's 
had his fun and then been dragged up by the heels for 



Bacillus and Circumstance 53 

it. Cheer up. Remember the good times that are gone. 
Life can't be all carrots, you know. 

Cottontail — But I never had any good times. 

Dr. Cony — Oh, yes, you did, I'll warrant you. 
There must have been many merry nights as the bot- 
tle passed around the table. {With evident gusto) 
Maybe there was a rousing song — "When Leeks Are 
Young in Springtime" — or something like that, and I 
wouldn't be surprised if now and again there was some 
fluffy little miss to sing soprano to your bass. Youth! 
Youth! To be young, a rabbit and stewed. (Quoting 
reminiscently) "A leaf of lettuce underneath the 
bough." After all, salad days are the best days. I 
never meet an old rabbit with gout but I take off my 
hat and say, "Sir, you have lived." 

Cottontail (wildly) — It's not true. I never lived 
like that. I never took a drink in my life. You can 
ask anybody. Nobody ever saw me take a drink. 

Dr. Cony — That's bad. You solitary drunkards are 
always the hardest to handle. But you've simply got to 
stop. You must quit drinking or die, that's all there 
is to it. 

Cottontail — This is terrible. It must have been 
that poisoned sword. I tell you, I was just sitting here 
quietly, reading The Evening Post — 

Dr. Cony — My dear sir, please rid yourself right 
away of the alcoholic's habit of confusing cause and 



54 Seeing Things at Night 

effect. He thinks he's sick because green elephants are 
walking on him, while, as a matter of fact, green ele- 
phants are walking on him because he's sick. It's ter- 
ribly simple, when you stop to figure it out. 

Cottontail — You don't think I saw any pink mon- 
ster come through the ceiling? 

Dr. Cony — On the contrary, I'm sure you did. But 
the point is, you mustn't see him again, and the only 
way to avoid seeing him is to quit drinking. Your 
fun's done. Now, be a good patient and tell me you'll 
stop drinking — 

Cottontail — I tell you I never had any fun. I 
never had any fun — 

Dr. Cony — Well, strictly speaking, it isn't the fun 
that hurts you, it's the rum. You must stop, even if 
you hate the stuff. Do you understand? 

Cottontail (hysterical) — I can't stop, I can't stop; 
I never started, I can't stop — 

Dr. Cony — Very well, sir, I must insist on taking the 
only measure that will save your life. (He steps to 
the door and calls) Mrs. Cottontail, will you come here 
immediately? 

(Enter Mrs. Cottontail.) 

Cottontail — My dear — 

Dr. Cony — If you please, madame. Let me explain 
first. You can have it out with your husband later. 
I'm sorry to tell you, Mrs. Cottontail, that your hus- 
band has gout. He has contracted it from excessive 



Bacillus and Circumstance 55 

drinking. You knew, of course, that he was a heavy 
drinker? 

Mrs. Cottontail {surprised, but not in the least 
incredulous) — I couldn't go so far as to say I knew it. 

Dr. Cony — He must stop or he'll die. 

Cottontail {rapidly and wildly) — I can explain 
everything, my dear. The doctor's all wrong. The 
whole trouble is somebody pulled the roof off the other 
day and stabbed me with a poisoned sword. I was 
right here in this room. I was just quietly reading 
The Evening Post. I knew no good would come of 
our moving into this new apartment house, with its 
fancy wire and green paint and free food, and all the 
rest of it. 

Dr. Cony {to Mrs. Cottontail, who aids him in ig- 
noring the patient) — You can see for yourself, madame, 
just how rational he is. I leave him in your care, Mrs. 
Cottontail. Don't let him out of your sight. Try and 
find out where he gets his liquor. If he pleads with 
you for a drink, be firm with him. Follow him every- 
where. Make him obey. It won't be hard in his en- 
feebled condition. I'll be around to-morrow. {To 
Cottontail) Remember, one drink may be fatal. 

{Exit Dr. Cony.) 

Cottontail — My dear, it was a pink monster, with 
an enormous dagger. It lifted off the ceiling — 

Mrs. Cottontail — Peter, can't you even be tem- 
perate in your lies? 



56 Seeing Things at Night 

Cottontail {sinking helplessly in his chair) — My 
dear, I was just sitting quietly, reading The Evening 
Post— 

Mrs. Cottontail — You brute! I always had a feel- 
ing you were too good to be true. 

Cottontail (feebly and hopelessly) — I was just 
sitting, reading The Evening Post (his voice trails off 
into nothingness. He sits motionless, huddled up in the 
chair. Suddenly he speaks again, but it is a new voice, 
strangely altered.) Mopsy, give me The Sun. 

Mrs. Cottontail (looking at him in amazement) 
— What do you say? 

Cottontail (His muscles relax. His eyes stare 
stupidly. He speaks without sense or expression) — 
The Sun! The Sun! The Evening Sun! 

(He is quite mad.) 

(Curtain.) 



Death Says It Isn't So 

The scene is a sickroom. It is probably in a hos- 
pital, for the walls are plain and all the corners are 
eliminated in that peculiar circular construction which 
is supposed to annoy germs. The shades are down 
and the room is almost dark. A doctor who has been 
examining the sick man turns to go. The nurse at his 
side looks at him questioningly. 

The Doctor (briskly) — I don't believe he'll last out 
the day. If he wakes or seems unusually restless, let 
me know. There's nothing to do. 

He goes out quietly, but quickly, for there is an- 
other man down at the end of the corridor who is al- 
most as sick. The nurse potters about the room for 
a moment or two, arranging whatever things it is that 
nurses arrange. She exits 1. c, or, in other words, 
goes out the door. There is just a short pause in the 
dark, quiet room shut out from all outside noises and 
most outside light. When the steam pipes are not 
clanking only the slow breathing of the man on the 
bed can be heard. Suddenly a strange thing happens. 

The door does not open or the windows, but there is 
unquestionably another man in the room. It couldn't 
have been the chimney, because there isn't any. Pos- 
sibly it is an optical illusion, but the newcomer seems 

57 



58 Seeing Things at Night 

just a bit indistinct for a moment or so in the dark- 
ened room. Quickly he raises both the window shades, 
and in the rush of bright sunlight he is definite enough 
in appearance. Upon better acquaintance it becomes 
evident that it couldn't have been the chimney, even if 
there had been one. The visitor is undeniably bulky, 
although extraordinarily brisk in his movements. He 
has a trick which will develop later in the scene of 
blushing on the slightest provocation. At that his color 
is habitually high. But this round, red, little man, 
peculiarly enough, has thin white hands and long taper- 
ing fingers, like an artist or a newspaper cartoonist. 
Very possibly his touch would be lighter than that of 
the nurse herself. At any rate, it is evident that he 
walks much more quietly. This is strange, for he does 
not rise on his toes, but puts his feet squarely on the 
ground. They are large feet, shod in heavy hobnail 
boots. No one but a golfer or a day laborer would wear 
such shoes. 

The hands of the little, round, red man preclude the 
idea that he is a laborer. The impression that he is 
a golfer is heightened by the fact that he is dressed 
loudly in very bad taste. In fact, he wears a plaid 
vest of the sort which was brought over from Scotland 
in the days when clubs were called sticks. The man 
in the gaudy vest surveys the sunshine with great sat- 
isfaction. It reaches every corner of the room, or 
rather it would but for the fact that the corners have 



Death Says It Isn't So 59 

been turned into curves. A stray beam falls across the 
eyes of the sick man on the bed. He wakes, and, rub- 
bing his eyes an instant, slowly sits up in bed and looks 
severely at the fat little man. 

The Sick Man (feebly, but vehemently) — No, you 
don't. I won't stand for any male nurse. I want Miss 
Bluchblauer. 

The Fat Man — I'm not a nurse, exactly. 

The Sick Man — Who are you? 

The Fat Man (cheerfully and in a matter of fact 
tone) — I'm Death. 

The Sick Man (sinking back on the bed) — That 
rotten fever's up again. I'm seeing things. 

The Fat Man (almost plaintively) — Don't you be- 
lieve I'm Death? Honest, I am. I wouldn't fool you. 
(He fumbles in his pockets and produces in rapid suc- 
cession a golf ball, a baseball pass, a G string, a large 
lump of gold, a receipted bill, two theater tickets and a 
white mass of sticky confection which looks as though 
it might be a combination of honey and something — 
milk, perhaps) — I've gone and left that card case again, 
but I'm Death, all right. 

The Sick Man — What nonsense! If you really 
were I'd be frightened. I'd have cold shivers up and 
down my spine. My hair would stand on end like the 
fretful porcupine. I'm not afraid of you. Why, when 
Sadie Bluchblauer starts to argue about the war she 
scares me more than you do. 



60 Seeing Things at Night 

The Fat Man {very much relieved and visibly 
brighter) — That's fine. I'm glad you're not scared. 
Now we can sit down and talk things over like friends. 

The Sick Man — I don't mind talking, but remem- 
ber I know you're not Death. You're just some trick 
my hot head's playing on me. Don't get the idea you're 
putting anything over. 

The Fat Man — But what makes you so sure I'm 
not Death? 

The Sick Man — Go on! Where's your black 
cloak? Where's your sickle? Where's your skeleton? 
Why don't you rattle when you walk? 

The Fat Man {horrified and distressed) — Why 
should I rattle? What do I want with a black overcoat 
or a skeleton? I'm not fooling you. I'm Death, all 
right. 

The Sick Man — Don't tell me that. I've seen 
Death a thousand times in the war cartoons. And I've 
seen him on the stage — Maeterlinck, you know, with 
green lights and moaning, and that Russian fellow, An- 
dreyeff, with no light at all, and hollering. And I've 
seen other plays with Death — lots of them. I'm one 
of the scene shifters with the Washington Square Play- 
ers. This isn't regular, at all. There's more light in 
here right now than any day since I've been sick. 

The Fat Man — I always come in the light. Be a 
good fellow and believe me. You'll see I'm right later 
on. I wouldn't fool anybody. It's mean. 



Death Says It Isn't So 61 

The Sick Man (laughing out loud) — Mean! 
What's meaner than Death? You're not Death. 
You're as soft and smooth-talking as a press agent. 
Why, you could go on a picnic in that make-up. 

The Fat Man (almost soberly) — I've been on pic- 
nics. 

The Sick Man — You're open and above board. 
Death's a sneak. You've got a nice face. Yes; you've 
got a mighty nice face. You'd stop to help a bum in 
the street or a kid that was crying. 

The Fat Man — I have stopped for beggars and 
children. 

The Sick Man — There, you see; I told you. 
You're kind and considerate. Death's the cruellest 
thing in the world. 

The Fat Man (very much agitated) — Oh, please 
don't say that! It isn't true. I'm kind; that's my 
business. When things get too rotten I'm the Qnly 
one that can help. They've got to have me. You 
should hear them sometimes before I come. I'm the 
one that takes them off battlefields and out of slums 
and all terribly tired people. I whisper a joke in their 
ears, and we go away, laughing. We always go away 
laughing. Everybody sees my joke, it's so good. 

The Sick Man— What's the joke? 

The Fat Man — I'll tell it to you later. 

Enter the Nurse. She almost runs into the Fat Man, 
but goes right past without paying any attention. It 



62 Seeing Things at Night 

almost seems as if she cannot see him. She goes to 
the bedside of the patient. 

The Nurse — So, you're awake. You feel any more 
comfortable? 

The Sick Man continues to stare at the Fat Man, 
but that worthy animated pantomime indicates that he 
shall say nothing of his being there. While this is on, 
the Nurse takes the patient's temperature. She looks 
at it, seems surprised, and then shakes the ther- 
mometer. 

The Sick Man {eagerly) — I suppose my tempera- 
ture's way up again, hey? I've been seeing things this 
afternoon and talking to myself. 

The Nurse — No; your temperature is almost 
normal. 

The Sick Man {incredulously) — Almost normal? 

The Nurse — Yes; under a hundred. 

She goes out quickly and quietly. The Sick Man 
turns to his fat friend. 

The Sick Man — What do you make of that? Less 
than a hundred. That oughtn't to make me see 
things; do you think so? 

The Fat Man — Well, I'd just as soon not be called 
a thing. Up there I'm called good old Death. Some 
of the fellows call me Bill. Maybe that's because I'm 
always due. 

The Sick Man — Rats! Is that the joke you prom- 
ised me? 



Death Says It Isn't So 63 

The Fat Man (pained beyond measure) — Oh, that 
was just a little unofficial joke. The joke's not like 
that. I didn't make up the real one. It wasn't made 
up at all. It's been growing for years and years. A 
whole lot of people have had a hand in fixing it up — 
Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Mark 
Twain and Rabelais — 

The Sick Man — Did that fellow Rabelais get in—? 
up there? 

The Fat Man — Well, not exactly, but he lives in 
one of the most accessible parts of the suburb, and we 
have him up quite often. He's popular on account of 
his after-dinner stories. What I might call his physi- 
cal humor is delightfully reminiscent and archaic. 

The Sick Man — There won't be any bodies, 
then? 

The Fat Man — Oh, yes, brand new ones. No ton- 
sils or appendixes, of course. That is, not as a rule. 
We have to bring in a few tonsils every year to amuse 
our doctors. 

The Sick Man — Any shows? 

The Fat Man — I should say so. Lots of 'em, and 
all hits. In fact, we've never had a failure (provoca- 
tively) Now, what do you think is the best show you 
ever saw? 

The Sick Man (reminiscently) — Well, just about 
the best show I ever saw was a piece called "Fair and 
Warmer," but, of course, you wouldn't have that. 



64 Seeing Things at Night 

The Fat Man — Of course, we have. The fellow be- 
fore last wanted that. 

The Sick Man {truculently) — I'll bet you haven't 
got the original company. 

The Fat Man (apologetically) — No, but we expect 
to get most of them by and by. Nell Gwyn does pretty 
well in the lead just now. 

The Sick Man (shocked) — Did she get in? 

The Fat Man — No, but Rabelais sees her home 
after the show. We don't think so much of a Fair and 
Warmer." That might be a good show for New York, 
but it doesn't class with us. It isn't funny enough. 

The Sick Man (with rising interest) — Do you 
mean to say you've got funnier shows than "Fair and 
Warmer"? 

The Fat Man — We certainly have. Why, it can't 
begin to touch that thing of Shaw's called "Ah, There, 
Annie!" 

The Sick Man— What Shaw's that? 

The Fat Man — Regular Shaw. 

The Sick Man — A lot of things must have been 
happening since I got sick. I hadn't heard he was 
dead. At that I always thought that vegetable truck 
was unhealthy. 

The Fat Man— He isn't dead. 

The Sick Man— Well, how about this "Ah, There, 
Annie!"? He never wrote that show down here. 

The Fat Man— But he will. 



Death Says It Isn't So 65 

The Sick Man (enormously impressed) — Do you 
get shows there before we have them in New York? 

The Fat Man — I tell you we get them before 
they're written. 

The Sick Man (indignantly) — How can you do 
that? 

The Fat Man — I wish you wouldn't ask me. The 
answer's awfully complicated. You've got to know a 
lot of higher math. Wait and ask Euclid about it. 
We don't have any past and future, you know. None 
of that nuisance about keeping shall and will straight. 

The Sick Man — Well, I must say that's quite a 
stunt. You get shows before they're written. 

The Fat Man — More than that. We get some that 
never do get written. Take that one of Ibsen's now, 
"Merry Christmas" — 

The Sick Man (fretfully)— Ibsen? 

The Fat Man — Yes, it's a beautiful, sentimental 
little fairy story with a ghost for the hero. Ibsen just 
thought about it and never had the nerve to go through 
with it. He was scared people would kid him, but 
thinking things makes them so with us. 

The Sick Man — Then I'd think a sixty-six round 
Van Cortlandt for myself. 

The Fat Man — You could do that. But why Van 
Cortlandt? We've got much better greens on our 
course. It's a beauty. Seven thousand yards long and 
I've made it in fifty-four. 



66 Seeing Things at Night 

The Sick Man {suspiciously) — Did you hole out 
on every green or just estimate? 

The Fat Man (stiffly) — The score is duly attested. 
I might add that it was possible because I drove more 
than four hundred yards on nine of the eighteen holes. 

The Sick Man — More than four hundred yards? 
How did you do that? 

The Fat Man — It must have been the climate, or 
(thoughtfully) it may be because I wanted so much to 
drive over four hundred yards on those holes. 

The Sick Man (with just a shade of scorn) — So 
that's the trick. I guess nobody'd ever beat me on 
that course; I'd just want the ball in the hole in one 
every time. 

The Fat Man (in gentle reproof) — No, you 
wouldn't. Where you and I are going pretty soon 
we're all true sportsmen and nobody there would take 
an unfair advantage of an opponent. 

The Sick Man — Before I go I want to know some- 
thing. There's a fellow in 125th Street's been awful 
decent to me. Is there any coming back to see people 
here? (A pause.) 

The Fat Man — I can't explain to you yet, but it's 
difficult to arrange that. Still, I wouldn't say that 
there never were any slumming parties from beyond the 
grave. 

The Sick Man (shivering) — The grave! I'd for- 
gotten about that. 



Death Says It Isn't So 67 

The Fat Man — Oh, you won't go there, and, what's 
more, you won't be at the funeral, either. I wish I 
could keep away from them. I hate funerals. They 
make me mad. You know, they say "Oh, Death, where 
is thy sting?" just as if they had a pretty good hunch 
I had one around me some place after all. And you 
know that other — "My friends, this is not a sad occa- 
sion," but they don't mean it. They keep it sad. They 
simply won't learn any better. I suppose they'd be 
a little surprised to know that you were sitting watch- 
ing Radbourne pitch to Ed. Delehanty with the bases 
full and three balls and two strikes called. Two runs 
to win and one to tie. 

The Sick Man— Will Radbourne pitch? 

The Fat Man — Sure thing. 

The Sick Man — And, say, will Delehanty bust that 
ball? 

The Fat Man — Make it even money and bet me 
either way. 

The Sick Man — I don't want to wait any longer. 
Tell me that joke of yours and let's go. 

The light softens a little. The room is almost rose 
color now. It might be from the sunset. The Fat Man 
gently pushes the head of the Sick Man back on the 
pillow. Leaning over, he whispers in his ear briefly 
and the Sick Man roars with laughter. As his laughter 
slackens a little The Fat Man says, "I'll meet you in 
the press box," and then before you know it he's gone. 



68 Seeing Things at Night 

The Sick Man is still laughing, but less loudly. Peo- 
ple who did not know might think it was gasping. The 
Nurse opens the door and is frightened. She loudly 
calls "Doctor! Doctor!" and runs down the corridor. 
The Sick Man gives one more chuckle and is silent. 
The curtains at one of the windows sway slightly. Of 
course, it's the breeze. 

{Curtain.) 



The Library of a Lover 

The responsibilities of a book reviewer, always 
heavy, sometimes assume a gravity which makes it 
quite impossible for them to be borne on any single 
pair of shoulders. We have received a letter to-day 
upon which so much depends that we hesitate to an- 
swer without requesting advice from readers. It is 
from a young man in Pittsburgh who identifies himself 
merely by the initials X. Q., which we presume to be 
fictitious. He writes as follows: 

"As a reader of the book columns of The Tribune 
I am humbly requesting your assistance in the matter 
of a little experiment that I desire to perform. I find 
myself highly enamored of a superlatively attractive 
young lady who has, however, one apparent drawback 
to me. That lies in the fact that she has never culti- 
vated a taste for really worth while reading. Such 
reading to me is one of the greatest of life's pleasures. 
Now, my idea is this: that this reading taste may be 
developed by the reading of a number of the best books 
in various lines. I have decided upon an experiment 
wherein a list of fifty books shall be furnished by you 
and a serious attempt made by the young lady to read 
them. When she has completed this reading I shall 
ask her to make a thoroughly frank statement as to 

69 



70 Seeing Things at Night 

whether a reading habit has been cultivated which will 
enable her to enjoy good literature. I would appre- 
ciate very much your furnishing me a list of fifty of 
the very best books which you consider suitable for the 
experiment which I have in mind. The lady in ques- 
tion has read but little, but has completed the regula- 
tion high school course and in addition has taken two 
years at one of the recognized girls' schools of the 
country." 

Obviously, the making of such a list involves a re- 
sponsibility which we do not care to assume. We do 
not like to risk the possibility that our own particular 
literary prejudices might rear a barrier between two 
fond hearts. After all, as somebody has said, fond 
hearts are more than Conrads. However, we do ven- 
ture the suggestion that if the young man's intentions 
are honorable, fifty books is far too great a number 
for the experiment which he has in mind. We have 
known many a young couple to begin life with no pos- 
session to their name but a common fondness for the 
poems of W. E. Henley. We have known others to 
marry on Kipling and repent on Shaw. 

Of course, it would be a great deal easier for us 
to advise the young man if we knew just what sort of 
a wife he wanted. If she likes Dombey and Son and 
Little Dorrit it seems to us fair to assume that she will 
be able to do a little plain mending and some of the 
cooking. On the other hand, if her favorite author is 



The Library of a Lover 71 

May Sinclair, we rather think it would be well to 
be prepared to provide hired help from the beginning. 
Should she prefer Eleanor H. Porter, we think there 
would be no danger in telling the paperhangers to do 
the bedroom in pink. After all, if she is a thorough- 
going follower of Pollyanna and the glad game, you 
don't really need any wall paper at all. It would still 
be her duty to be glad about it. 

But we are afraid that some of this is frivolous and 
beside the point, and we assume that the young man 
truly wants serious advice to help him in the solution of 
his problem. Since marriage is at best a gamble, we 
advise him earnestly not to compromise his ardor with 
any dreary round of fifty books. Let him chance all 
on a single volume. And what shall it be? Personally, 
we have always been strongly attracted by persons who 
liked Joan and Peter, but we know that there are ex- 
cellent wives and mothers who find this particular novel 
of Wells's dreary stuff. There are certain dislikes 
which might well serve as green signals of caution. A 
young man, we think, should certainly go slow if she 
does not like An Inland Voyage, or Virginibus Puer- 
isque, or The Ebb Tide or Sentimental Tommy. He 
should take thought and ask himself repeatedly, "Is 
this really love?" if she confesses a distaste for Tono 
Bungay, or Far from the Madding Crowd, or Cczsar 
and Cleopatra. And if she can find no interest in 
Conrad in Quest of Hij Youth, or Mary Olivier or 



72 Seeing Things at Night 

Huckleberry Finn, let him by all means stipulate a long 
engagement. But if she dislikes Alice in Wonderland 
let the young man temporize no more. It is then his 
plain duty to tell her that he has made a mistake and 
that what he took for love was no more than the pass- 
ing infatuation of physical passion. 



A Bolt from the Blue 

John Roach Straton died and went to his ap- 
pointed kingdom where he immediately sought an au- 
dience with the ruler of the realm. 

"Let New York be destroyed," shouted Dr. Straton 
as he pushed his way into the inner room. The king 
was engaged at the moment in watching a sparrow fall 
to earth and motioned the visitor to compose himself 
in silence, but there was an urgency in the voice and 
manner of the man from earth which would not be de- 
nied. "Smite them hip and thigh," said Dr. Straton 
and the king looked down at him and asked, "Is the 
necessity immediate?" 

"Delay not thy wrath," said Dr. Straton, "for to- 
day on thy Sabbath sixty thousand men, women, and 
children of New York have gathered together to watch 
a baseball game." 

The ruler of the realm looked and saw that 11,967 
persons were watching the Yankees and the White Sox 
at the Polo Grounds. 

"A good husky tidal wave would confound them," 
urged Straton, but the king shook his head. 

"Remember the judgment you heaped upon Sodom 
and upon Gomorrah," suggested Straton. 

The ruler of the realm nodded without enthusiasm. 

73 



74 Seeing Things at Night 

"I remember/' he said, "but as I recollect it didn't do 
much goou." 

Dr. Straton's bright hopefulness faded and the king 
hastened to reassure him. "We can think up some- 
thing better than that/' he said, and had the visitor 
been an observant man he might have noticed that the 
streets of the kingdom were paved with tact. "Now 
there was the Tower of Babel/' said the ruler of the 
realm reflectively, "that was a creative idea. That was 
a doom which persisted because it had ingenuity as well 
as power. That's what we need now." 

Suddenly there dawned in the face of the king an 
idea, and it seemed to Dr. Straton as if he were stand- 
ing face to face with a sunrise. The doctor lowered 
his eyes and he saw that the men and the women Sab- 
bath breakers of New York were all upon their feet 
and shouting, though to his newly immortal senses the 
din came feebly. "Now," he said, with an exultation 
which caused him to slip into his old pulpit manner, 
"let 'em have it." 

But the king with keener vision than Dr. Straton, 
saw that it was the ninth inning, the score tied, run- 
ners on first and second, and Babe Ruth coming to 
bat. "The time has not come," said the king, and he 
pushed the doctor gently and made him give ground 
a little. And they waited until two strikes had been 
pitched and three balls. The next one would have cut 
the heart of the plate, but Babe Ruth swung and the 



A Bolt from the Blue 75 



ball rose straight in the air. Up and up it came until 
it disappeared from the view of all the players and 
spectators and even of the umpires. Soon a mighty 
wrangle began. Miller Huggins claimed a home run 
and Kid Gleason argued that the ball was foul. The 
umpires waited for an hour and then, as the ball had 
not yet come down, Dineen was forced to make a deci- 
sion and shouted "Foul!" while the crowd booed. One 
of the pop bottles injured him rather badly and there 
was a riot for which it was necessary to call out the 
reserves. Everybody went home disgruntled and a 
month later the Lusk bill abolishing Sunday baseball 
was passed. 

And all the time the ball continued to rise until sud- 
denly the king, thrusting out his left hand, caught it 
neatly and slipped it into his pocket. It was not a con- 
ventional pocket, for there were planets in it and ever- 
lasting mercy and other things. For a long time Dr. 
Straton had been awed into silence by the mighty mira- 
cle, but now he spoke, reverently but firmly. 

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but you will observe 
that there is a sign in the baseball park which says 
'All balls batted out of the diamond remain the prop- 
erty of the New York Baseball Club and should be 
thrown back!' " 

The ruler of the realm smiled. "You forget," he 
answered, "that if I threw the ball back from this great 
height it might strike a man and kill him, it might crash 



76 Seeing Things a^ Night 

through a huge office building, it might even destroy 
the Calvary Baptist Church." 

Then for the first time a touch of sharpness came 
into the voice of Dr. Straton. "All ihat is immaterial," 
he said. "I think I know my theology well enough to 
understand that law is law and right is right, come 
what may." 

"Oh, but it's not nearly as simple as all that," re- 
monstrated the king. "There are right things which 
are so harsh and unpleasant that they become wrong; 
and wrong things which are, after all, so jolly that it's 
hard not to call them right. Why, sometimes I have 
to stop a fraction of a century myself to reach a deci- 
sion. It's terribly complicated. The problem is in- 
finite. No mere man, quick or dead, has any right to 
be dogmatic about it." 

"Come, come," said Dr. Straton, and now there was 
nothing but anger in his voice, "I've heard all those 
devilish arguments before. When I came here I 
thought you were God and that this was Heaven. I 
know now that there's been a mistake. God is no 
mollycoddle." 

He turned on his heel and started to walk away 
before he remembered that he was a Southern gen- 
tleman as well as a clergyman and bowed stiffly, once. 
Then he went to the edge of the kingdom and jumped. 
Where he landed it would be hard to say. Only a 
carefully trained theologian could tell. 



Inasmuch 

Once there lived near Bethlehem a man named 
Simon and his wife Deborah. And Deborah dreamed 
a curious dream, a dream so vivid that it might bet- 
ter be called a vision. It was not yet daybreak, but 
she roused her husband and told him that an angel 
had come to her in the vision and had said, as she 
remembered it, "To-morrow night in Bethlehem the 
King of the World will be born." The rest was not 
so vivid in Deborah's mind, but she told Simon that 
wise men and kings were already on their way to 
Bethlehem, bringing gifts for the wonder child. 

"When he is born," she said, "the wise men and the 
kings who bring these gifts will see the stars dance in 
the heavens and hear the voices of angels. You and 
I must send presents, too, for this child will be the 
greatest man in all the world." 

Simon objected that there was nothing of enough 
value in the house to take to such a child, but Deb- 
orah replied, "The King of the World will under- 
stand." Then, although it was not yet light, she got 
up and began to bake a cake, and Simon went beyond 
the town to the hills and got holly and made a wreath. 
Later in the day husband and wife looked over all their 
belongings, but the only suitable gift they could find 

77 



yS Seeing Things at Night 

was one old toy, a somewhat battered wooden duck 
that had belonged to their eldest son, who had grown 
up and married and gone away to live in Galilee. 
Simon painted the toy duck as well as he could, and 
.Deborah told him to take it and the cake and the 
wreath of holly and go to Bethlehem. "It's not much," 
she said, "but the King will understand." 

It was almost sunset when Simon started down the 
winding road that led to Bethlehem. Deborah watched 
him round the first turn and would have watched 
longer except that he was walking straight toward the 
sun and the light hurt her eyes. She went back into the 
house and an hour had hardly passed when she heard 
Simon whistling in the garden. He was walking very 
slowly. At the door he hesitated for almost a minute. 
She looked up when he came in. He was empty 
handed. 

"You haven't been to Bethlehem," said Deborah. 

"No," said Simon. 

"Then, where is the cake, and the holly wreath, and 
the toy duck?" 

"I'm sorry," said Simon, "I couldn't help it some- 
how. It just happened." 

"What happened?" asked Deborah sharply. 

"Well," said Simon, "just after I went around the 
first turn in the road I found a child sitting on that 
big white rock, crying. He was about two or three 
years old, and I stopped and asked him why he was 



Inasmuch 79 



crying. He didn't answer. Then I told him not to 
cry like that, and I patted his head, but that didn't 
do any good. I hung around, trying to think up some- 
thing, and I decided to put the cake down and take 
him up in my arms for a minute. But the cake slipped 
out of my hands and hit the rock, and a piece of the 
icing chipped off. Well, I thought, that baby in Beth- 
lehem won't miss a little piece of icing, and I gave it 
to the child and he stopped crying. But when he fin- 
ished he began to cry again. I just sort of squeezed 
another little piece of icing off, and that was all right, 
for a little while; but then I had to give him another 
piece, and things went on that way, and all of a sudden 
I found that there wasn't any cake left. After that 
he looked as if he might cry again, and I didn't have 
any more cake and so I showed him the duck and he 
said 'Ta-ta.' I just meant to lend him the duck for a 
minute, but he wouldn't give it up. I coaxed him a 
good while, but he wouldn't let go. And then a woman 
came out of that little house and she began to scold 
him for staying out so late, and so I told her it was my 
fault and I gave her the holly wreath just so she 
wouldn't be mad at the child. And after that, you see, 
I didn't have anything to take to Bethlehem, and so I 
came back here." 

Deborah had begun to cry long before Simon fin- 
ished his story, but when he had done she lifted up her 
head and said, "How could you do it, Simon? Those 



8o Seeing Things at Night 

presents were meant for the King of the World, and 
you gave them to the first crying child you met on the 
road." 

Then she began to cry again, and Simon didn't know 
what to say or do, and it grew darker and darker in 
the room and the fire on the hearth faded to a few 
embers. And that little red glow was all there was 
in the room. Now, Simon could not even see Deborah 
across the room, but he could still hear her sobbing. 
But suddenly the room was flooded with light and Deb- 
orah's sobbing broke into a great gulp and she rushed 
to the window and looked out. The stars danced in 
the sky and from high above the house came the voice 
of angels saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and 
on earth peace, good will toward men." 

Deborah dropped to her knees in a panic of joy and 
fear. Simon knelt beside her, but first he said, "I 
thought maybe that the baby in Bethlehem wouldn't 
mind so very much." 



H. 3rd — The Review of a Continuous 
Performance 

March i, 19 19. — "Do you know how to keep the 
child from crying?" began the prospectus. "Do you 
know how always to obtain cheerful obedience?" it 
continued. "To suppress the fighting instinct? To 
teach punctuality? Perseverance? Carefulness? Hon- 
esty? Truthfulness? Correct pronunciation?" 

We pondered. Obviously, our rejoinder must be: 
"In reply to questions Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 
the answer is in the negative." 

The prospectus said that all this would be easy if 
you bought the book. 

"Instead of a hardship," the advertisement said, 
"child training becomes a genuine pleasure, as the par- 
ent shares every confidence, every joy and every sor- 
row of the child, and at the same time has its unqualified 
respect. This is a situation rarely possible under the 
old training methods. And what a source of pride now 
as well as in after years! To have children whose 
every action shows culture and refinement — perfect lit- 
tle gentlemen and gentlewomen." 

This gave us pause. After all, we were not cer- 
tain that we wanted a little gentleman who washed be- 
hind the ears, wore blue velvet and took his baths with 

81 



82 Seeing Things at Night 

a broad "a." We felt that he might expect too much 
from us. It might cramp our style to live with a per- 
son entirely truthful, punctual, persevering, honest and 
careful. Also, we were a little abashed about sharing 
confidences. The privilege of becoming a confidant 
would involve a return in kind, and it would not be a 
fair swap. It seemed to us that the confessions of the 
truthful, honest, careful and persevering child could 
never be half so interesting as our own. 

We were also a little bit discouraged over the prom- 
ise to suppress the fighting instinct. We did not feel 
qualified for the job of making it up to him by chas- 
tising the parents of the various boys along the block 
who drubbed him. And yet we were not entirely dis- 
suaded until we read something of the manner in which 
the new method should be applied. It was hard to 
thrust aside the knowledge of how to keep the child 
from crying. But, then, the book said :"No matter 
whether your child is still in the cradle or is eighteen 
years old, this course will show how to apply the right 
methods at once. You merely take up the particular 
trait, turn to the proper page and apply the lessons to 
the child. You are told exactly what to do." 

, It wasn't that we were afraid that somebody else 
around the house might get hold of the book and turn 
it on us. That risk we might have faced. But a quo- 
tation from Abraham Lincoln in the prospectus itself 
brought complete disillusion. "All that I am and all 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 83 

that I ever hope to be I owe to my mother." That's 
what Abraham Lincoln said, according to the pros- 
pectus. It seemed, perhaps, like halving the proper ac- 
knowledgments, and yet it lay in the right direction. 
But what of the punctual, persevering and truthful 
child brought up under the new method? We could 
see only one acknowledgment open to him. We pic- 
tured his first inaugural address, and seemed to hear 
him say: "All that I am to-day I owe to Professor 
Tunkhouser's book on The Training of Children. If I 
am honest you have only to look on page 29 to know 
the reason. It is true that I have persevered to gain 
this high office, and why should I not, seeing that I 
was cradled in page 136?" 

Of course, if he had not overlooked the chapter on 
proper gratitude he might upon maturity return the 
purchase price of Professor Tunkhouser's volume. 
That seemed almost the most to be expected. 

And so we let him cry, and are going on in the old, 
careless way, hoping to be able, unscientifically enough, 
to lick a working amount of truth and general virtue 
into him at such time as that becomes necessary. How- 
ever, we did write to the publisher to ask him if by any 
chance he had a book along the same lines about Aire- 
dale puppies. 



June 5, 191 9. — "Izzie gonna teachie itty cu turns 
English or not?" asks Prudence Brandish in effect in 



84 Seeing Things at Night 

her book Mother Love in Action, and proceeds to pro- 
test vigorously against the practice of bringing up 
children on baby talk. It is true that parents deserve 
part of the blame, but babies ought to be made to re- 
alize that some of the responsibility is theirs. Often 
they talk the jargon themselves without any encourage- 
ment whatever. Indeed, they have been known to 
cling to muddled words and phrases in spite of the 
soundest reasoning which all their parents could bring 
to bear on the matter. H. 3rd, for instance, has 
been told repeatedly that the word is "button," and yet 
he goes on calling it "bur" or "but" or something like 
that. 

We feel very strongly that he should get it straight, 
because it is the only word he knows. He tried 
"moma" and "dayday" for a while, but abandoned 
them when he seemed to sense opposition against his 
attempt to use them broadly enough to include casual 
friends and total strangers. R., who comes from Vir- 
ginia, could not be made to abandon a narrow-minded 
point of view about H.'s conception of his relation to 
the ashman. 

"But" seems much more elastic and does not in- 
volve the child in questions of race prejudice and other 
problems which he does not fully comprehend as yet. 
The round disks on a coat are "buts," and H. seems 
satisfied that so are doorknobs and ears and noses. 
He is, to be sure, not quite content that all should 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 8<J 

be sewn on so firmly. There seems to be no limit 
to his conception of the range of his one word "but." 
If he could get his hands on the Washington Monu- 
ment or the peak of the Matterhorn, we feel sure that 
he would also classify these as buttons. 

Much may be done with one word if it be used 
cosmically in this way. For the sake of H. we have 
been trying to develop a theory that all the problems 
of the world may be stated in terms of buttons. We 
intend to point out to him that if he finds a gentle- 
man with two buttons on either hip to which suspenders 
are attached, he may safely set him down as a con- 
servative. If, in addition, the gentleman wears an- 
other gold button tightly wedged into a starched col- 
lar just below his chin he may be classified as an ex- 
ponent of a high protective tariff and a Republican ma- 
jority in the Senate. From gentlemen with no buttons, 
either at the hips or the neck, he may expect to hear 
about the soviet experiment in Russia and the status 
of free speech in America. 

We intend to tell H. that he is not far wrong in 
his attempt to limit language to the one word "but" 
or "bur," since all the world struggles in religion, in 
politics and in economics are between those who be- 
lieve in buttoning up life a little tighter and those who 
would cut away all fastenings and let gravity do its 
worst or best. However, we have told him fairly and 
squarely that we will not let him in on this simplifying 



86 Seeing Things at Night 

and comforting short cut to knowledge until he can 
make the word come out clearly and distinctly — 
"button." 



September 3, 1919. — H. 3rd lay back in his car- 
riage with his arms folded across his stomach and said 
nothing. I tried to make conversation. I pointed out 
objects of interest, but met no response. He smiled 
complacently and was silent. Even carefully re- 
hearsed bits of dialogue such as "Who's a good boy?" 
to which the answer is "Me," and "Is your face 
dirty," to which the answer is "No," failed to move 
him to speech. I tried him in new lands with strange 
sights and pointed out the camels, and buffaloes and 
rhinoceri of the zoo, hoping that he would identify some 
one of them in his all-embracing "dog," which serves 
for every member of the four-footed family. But still 
he smiled complacently and was silent. I began to feel 
as if I were an Atlantic City negro wheeling a tired 
business man down the Boardwalk. 

Suddenly the possible value of suggestion came to 
me, and I turned to the right and finally brought up 
at the foot of Shakespeare's statue in the mall. And 
here again I sought to interest him in the English lan- 
guage. "Man," said I, rather optimistically, point- 
ing to the bronze. H. 3rd looked intently, and taking 
his hands from his stomach answered "Boy." "Man," 
I repeated. "Boy," said H. 3rd. And so the argu- 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 87 

ment continued for some time without progress being 
made by either side. At last I stopped. Is it possible, 
I thought, that in this curious statue the sculptor has 
succeeded in giving some suggestion of "sweetest 
Shakespeare, fancy's child," which is communicated to 
H. 3rd and fails to reach me? I looked again and 
gave up this theory for one more simple and rational. 
Without question it was the doublet and hose which 
confused him. Never, I suppose, had the child seen 
me, or the janitor, or the iceman or any of his adult 
male friends clad in close fitting tights such as Shake- 
speare wore. And then I looked at the doublet. No, 
there was no denying that in this particular statue it 
appeared uncommonly like a diaper. 



September 5, 1919. — W. H. Hudson points the way 
to an interesting field of speculation in one of the early 
chapters of Far Away and Long Ago, in which he 
speaks of his mother. 

"When I think of her," he writes, "I remember with 
gratitude that our parents seldom punished us, and 
never, unless we went too far in our domestic dissen- 
sions or tricks, even chided us. This, I am convinced, 
is the right attitude for parents to observe, modestly 
to admit that nature is wiser than they are, and to let 
their little ones follow, as far as possible, the bent of 
their own minds, or whatever it is that they have in 
place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen 



88 Seeing Things at Night 

toward her ducklings, when she has had frequent experi- 
ence of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that 
they know best what is good for them; though, of 
course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can 
never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going 
into the water. I need not be told that the hen is, 
after all, only stepmother to her ducklings, since I am 
contending that the civilized woman — the artificial 
product of our self-imposed conditions — cannot have 
the same relation to her offspring as the uncivilized 
woman really has to hers. The comparison, therefore, 
holds good, the mother with us being practically step- 
mother to children of another race; and if she is sensi- 
ble, and amenable to nature's teaching, she will attrib- 
ute their seemingly unsuitable ways and appetites to 
the right cause, and not to a hypothetical perversity or 
inherent depravity of heart, about which many authors 
will have spoken to her in many books: 

"But though they wrote it all by rote 
They did not write it right." 

The very dim race memory of old tribal and even 
primitive life which is in all of us is much stronger in 
children than in grown-ups. They are closer to the 
past than their elders, and although we hear a great 
deal about maternal instinct, it is probable that it is 
a much slighter and more limited thing than the instinct 
of a young child. 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 89 

I have noticed, for instance, that without any help 
from me H. 3rd has learned to fall with amazing 
skill. He can trip over the edge of the carpet, do a 
somersault ending on the point of his nose and come 
up smiling, unless some grown-up makes him aware 
of his danger by crying out in horror. He did not 
copy it from me. I have never even undertaken to 
teach him by precept or illustration. The difficult 
trick of relaxing in midair is his own contribution. 
He cannot be said to have learned it. He seems always 
to have had it. At the age of eight months he pitched 
headlong out of his carriage and landed on top of his 
head without so much as ruffling his feelings. It may 
be fantastic, but I rather think that his skill in pre- 
paring for the bump by a complete relaxation of every 
muscle is a legacy from some ancestor back in the 
days when knowing how to fall was of vital impor- 
tance, since even the best of us might, upon special 
occasions, miscalculate the distance from branch to 
branch. 

So strong is my faith in the child's superior memory 
of primitive life that if the hallboy were to call me up 
on the telephone to-morrow to say that there was an 
ichthyosaurus downstairs who wanted to see me, I 
would not think of deciding what to do about it with- 
out first consulting H. 3rd. 

Curiously enough, Hudson relates one incident which 
might well be cited in support of the theory that the 



90 Seeing Things at Night 

child is equipped at birth with certain protective in- 
stincts, but he passes it over with a different explana- 
tion. He says that on a certain afternoon his baby 
sister, who could scarcely walk, was left alone in a 
room, and suddenly came toddling to the door shrieking 
"ku-ku," an Argentine word for danger, which was 
almost her single articulate possession. Her parents 
rushed into the room and found a huge snake coiled 
up in the middle of the rug. The child had never seen 
a snake before, and there was much speculation as to 
how she knew it was dangerous. 

"It was conjectured," writes Hudson, "that she had 
made some gesture to push it away when it came onto 
the rug, and that it had reared its head and struck vi- 
ciously at her." 

It seems to us that a much more plausible explana- 
tion lies in the theory that this child who had never seen 
a snake profited from some old racial memory of the 
danger of serpents. 

Unfortunately, under modern conditions some re- 
strictions must be put on the liberty of small children. 
I have been told that a child knows instinctively that 
he must not put his hand into a fire, but he has no 
age-grounded instinct not to touch a radiator. Still, 
it might be fair to say that in most New York apart- 
ment houses none of them would be hot enough to 
hurt him much. I can testify that children of less than 
two years of age are not equipped with any inherited 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 91 

protective knowledge about matches, pins, cigarette 
stubs, $5 bills, or even those of larger denominations; 
bits of glass, current newspapers or magazines, safety 
razor blades (for which, of course, there is an excuse, 
since the adjective may well mislead a child), watches 
or carving knives. But all these articles are too recent 
to come within the scope of inherited primitive knowl- 
edge. 



December 17, 1919. — We read Floyd Dell's Were 
You Ever a Child? to-day and found him remarking: 
"People talk about children being hard to teach and 
in the next breath deplore the facility with which they 
acquire the 'vices.' That seems strange. It takes as 
much patience, energy and faithful application to be- 
come proficient in a vice as it does to learn mathe- 
matics. Yet consider how much more popular poker 
is than equations! But did a schoolboy ever drop in 
on a group of teachers who had sat up all night parsing, 
say, a sentence in Henry James, or seeing who could 
draw the best map of the North Atlantic states? And 
when you come to think of it, it seems extremely im- 
probable that any little boy ever learned to drink beer 
by seeing somebody take a tablespoonful once a day." 

Most of this is true. The only trouble with all the 
new theories about bringing up children is that it 
leaves the job just as hard as ever. 

We believe in the new theories for all that. They 



92 Seeing Things at Night 

work, we think, but, like most worth while things, they 
are not always easy. For instance, H. 3rd came into 
the parlor the other day carrying the carving knife. 
Twenty years ago I could have taken it away and 
spanked him, but then along came the psychologists 
with their talk of breaking the child's will, and sensible 
people stopped spanking. Ten years ago I could have 
said, "Put down that carving knife or you'll make God 
feel very badly. In fact, you'll make dada feel 
very badly. You'll make dada cry if you don't obey 
him." But then the psychoanalysts appeared and 
pointed out that there was danger in that. In trying 
to punish the child by making him feel that his evil 
acts directly caused suffering to the parent there was 
an unavoidable tendency to make the child identify 
himself with the parent subconsciously. That might 
lead to all sorts of ructions later on. The child might 
identify himself so completely with his father that in 
later life he would use his shirts and neckties as if they 
were his own. 

Of course, I might have gone over to H. 3rd and, 
after a short struggle, taken the carving knife away 
from him by main force, but that would have made him 
mad. He would at length have suppressed his anger 
and right away a complex would begin in his little 
square head. 

Picture him now at thirty — he has neuralgia. 
Somebody mentions the theory of blind abscesses and 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 93 

he has all his teeth pulled out. No good comes of it. 
He goes to a psychoanalyst and the doctor begins to 
ask questions. He asks a great many over a long 
period of time. Eventually he gets a clue. He finds 
that when H. 3rd was eight years old he dreamed 
three nights in succession of stepping on a June bug. 

"Was it a large, rather fat June bug?" asks the 
doctor carelessly, as if the answer was not important. 

"Yes," says H. 3rd, "it was." 

"That June bug," says the doctor, "was a symbol of 
your father. When you were twenty months old he 
took a carving knife away from you and you have had 
a suppressed anger at him ever since. Now that you 
know about it your neuralgia will disappear." 

And the neuralgia would go at that. But by that 
time I'd be gone and nothing could be done about this 
suppressed feud of so many years' standing. My mind 
went through all these possibilities and I decided it 
would be simpler and safer to let H. 3rd keep the 
carving knife as long as he attempted nothing aggres- 
sive. A wound is not so dangerous as a complex. 

"And, anyhow," I thought, "if he can make that 
carving knife cut anything he's the best swordsman in 
the flat." 



December 20, 191 9. — Our attitude toward H. 3rd 
and the carving knife turns out to have been all wrong. 
We received a letter from Floyd Dell to-day in which 



94 Seeing Things at Night 

he points out that no Freudian could possibly approve 
our policy of non-interference. Mr. Dell says we 
should have used force to the utmost. 

"Psychoanalytically speaking/' he writes, "I think 
you were wrong about H. 3rd and the carving knife. 
There is really no Freudian reason why, when he came 
carrying it into the parlor, you should not have gone 
over to him and, 'after a short struggle/ taken it away 
from him by main force. Of course, that would have 
made him mad. But what harm would that have done? 
. . . Unless, of course, you had previously represented 
yourself to him as a Divine and Perfect Being. In 
that case his new conception of you as a big bully 
would have had to struggle with his other carefully 
implanted and nourished emotions — and his sense of 
the injustice of your behavior might have been 're- 
pressed.' 

"But you know quite well that you are not a Divine 
and Perfect Being, and, if you consider it for a mo- 
ment from the child's point of view, you will concede 
that his emotional opinion of you under such circum- 
stances, highly colored as it is, has its justification. 
When you yourself want something very much 
(whether you are entitled to it or not) and when some 
one (however righteously) keeps you from getting it, 
how do you feel? But you know that you live in a 
world in which such things happen. H. 3rd has still to 
learn it, and if he learns it at his father's knee he is 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 95 

just that much ahead. The boys at school will teach 
it to him, anyway. The fact is, parents are unwilling 
that their children should hate them, however briefly, 
healthily and harmlessly. 

"The Victorian parent spanked his offspring and 
commanded them to love him any way. The modern 
parent refrains from spanking (for good reasons) and 
hopes the child will love him. The Freudian parent 
does not mind if his children do hate him once or 
twice a day, so long as they are not ashamed of doing 
so. If H. 3rd swats his father in an enraged struggle 
to keep possession of the precious carving knife he 
is expressing and not repressing his emotions. And so 
long as he has done his best to win he is fairly well 
content to lose. What a child doesn't like is to have 
to struggle with a big bully that he mustn't (for mys- 
terious reasons) even try to lick! The privilege of 
fighting with one's father, even if it does incidentally 
involve getting licked, is all that a healthy child asks 
for. Never fear, the time will come when he can lick 
you; and awaiting that happy time will give him an 
incentive for growing up. Quite possibly you don't 
want him to grow up; but that is only another of. the 
well-known weaknesses of parents! " 



December 22, 191 9. — Concerning H. 3rd and the 
carving knife I am gratified to find support for my 
position from Dr. Edward Hiram Reede, the well- 



96 Seeing Things at Night 

known Washington neurologist, who finds that from 
the point of view of H. 3rd there was soundness in my 
policy of non-interference. 

"Speaking for him," he writes, "I commend your ac- 
tion. Urged as he is by the two chief traits of child- 
hood, at the present time — curiosity and imitation— I 
see no reason for direct coercion. So long as the 
modern child is environed by a museum, as the modern 
home appears, his curiosity must always be on edge, 
and if each new goal of curiosity is wrested from him 
by the usual ' Don't!' or the more ancient struggle for 
possession instead of by a transference of interest, then 
the contest will be interminable. 

"H. 3rd by right of experience looks upon the ar- 
mamentarium of the kitchen as his indisputable posses- 
sions and can hardly be expected to except a carver. 
The deification of the parent occurs in accord with 
the ancestor worship of primitive forebears, and the 
father will remain the god to the child so long as ob- 
servation daily reveals the parent as a worker of 
miracles. Parental self-canonization is not at all neces- 
sary to produce this." 



December 23, 191 9. — Recently, a reader wrote to 
inform us that in her opinion we were a "semi-Bol- 
shevist," and added, "your style is cramped by this 
demi-semi attitude, and your stuff seems a little gro- 
tesque both to conservatives and radicals." This 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 97 

seemed fair comment to us and we confessed frankly 
that we were not a conservative and on clear and 
pleasant days not quite a radical. This business of 
sticking to the middle of the road, with perhaps a slight 
slant to the left, seems ever so difficult. One is am- 
bushed and potted at from either side. Seemingly, 
even in our confession we have again offended, for 
Miss Mora M. Deane writes: 

"As it happens I have just read your comment on 
my letter; and since you have turned out to be merely 
an egotist who twists an adverse criticism to his own 
advantage, I must now add to my letter that part 
which I lopped off considerately. This precisely be- 
cause I did not know you were an egotist. The deleted 
part which originally closed the letter follows : 

"At any rate I have lately heard intelligent persons 
from both camps saying, 'Heywood Broun is respon- 
sible for my going to see some pretty rotten plays and 
for reading some stupid books.' 

"I myself should like to warn you against letting 
Heywood 3rd ever read Floyd Dell's book. The very 
idea of his advising about children leaves a bad taste 
in the mouth. You'll be sorry some day if you ever 
take him seriously." 

Of course, Miss Deane does wisely to let us have 
the deletion. First impulses are usually sound. 

And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more 
heavily than she could well have realized. Her warn- 



98 Seeing Things at Night 

ing that I should protect H. 3rd from radical litera- 
ture touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost 
by intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child 
and I are not in agreement in our political opinions. 
Of the fifteen or twenty words in which H. 3rd is 
proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." 
When he goes to the park he wears a naval uniform 
with the insignia of an ensign on his left arm. There 
is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in his 
own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, 
a rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture 
books, an automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort 
to socialize a single one of these holdings is met by a 
protest so violent that I cannot help but realize that 
the child's sense of property rights is strongly devel- 
oped. That is, his own property rights, for he is often 
inclined to dispute my title to cigarette stumps, safety 
razor blades and carving knives. 

Moreover, H. 3rd is unblushingly parasitic. We 
fail to remember that he has ever offered to make any 
return for the regular income of milk and oatmeal, 
and sometimes carrots, which is issued to him regularly 
by his parents. To be sure, he once gave me a chicken 
bone and on another occasion a spool of cotton, but 
both times he promptly took them away again. I am 
even inclined to question whether, in any strictly legal 
sense, the chicken bone or the spool were his. Grant- 
ing that they had been carelessly discarded by other 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 99 

members of his family, and that, by his own efforts, 
H. 3rd rescued the spool from the scrapbasket and 
the chicken bone from behind the trash box, the fact 
remains that it was I who bought the chicken and Miss 
X who purchased the spool. We were entitled at least 
to a royalty during the life of the two utilities, but H. 
3rd merely absorbed them without explanation or 
promise. 

I doubt whether Dell or Eastman or even Karl Marx 
himself could avail to check the rampant individualism 
of the child. He has always displayed an impatience 
and an irritation at abstract arguments, llie best 
that can be done is to avoid introducing contentious 
subjects. For the present Miss X and I are able to 
carry on destructive and seditious conversations even 
in his presence by spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t" 
and a b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e" and other words which might 
make him mad. We have even been able to keep 
Trotzky's picture above the mantelpiece in the red 
room, but in this case Miss X adopted a subterfuge 
which seems to me rather questionable. She told H. 
3rd that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler. 

When H. 3rd is twenty-one he will come into un- 
disputed possession of the two Liberty bonds and the 
card of thrift stamps for which Miss X and I starved 
and scraped. I rather hope he will thank us, but be- 
yond that I expect nothing except good advice. I can 
see him now squaring his shoulders, as becomes a man 



ioo Seeing Things at Night 

of property and independent income, and then laying 
a kindly hand on my shoulder as he says, "Dad, can't 
you understand how wrong you are? Don't you see 
that if you disturb or even threaten the institution of 
private property you undermine the home, imperil the 
state and destroy initiative?" 



January 21, 1920. — When the rest went out and left 
me alone in the house, they said that H. 3rd would 
surely sleep through the evening. Nobody remem- 
bered that he had ever waked up to cry. But he did 
this night. I didn't quite know what to do about it. 
I sang "Rockabye Baby" to him, but that didn't do 
any good, and then I said "I wouldn't cry if I were 
you." This, too, had no effect, and, in fact, no sooner 
had I uttered it than I recognized it as a piece of 
gratuitous impertinence. How could I possibly tell 
whether or not I would cry if the safety pins were in 
wrong or anything else of that sort was not quite right? 

Nor was it even fair to assume that H. 3rd was cry- 
ing for any such personal reasons. After all, he lives 
in a state which has recently suspended five duly 
elected assemblymen, and in which as fine a book as 
Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the 
Society for the Suppression of Vice, and his country 
has gone quite hysterical on the subject of "Reds" and 
"Red" propaganda and I haven't paid him back yet 
for that $50 Liberty Bond of his which I sold. 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 10 1 

And after I had thought of these things it seemed to 
me that he was entirely justified in crying, and that I 
ought to be ashamed of myself because I didn't cry, 
too, since there were so many wrong things in the 
world to be righted. Humbly I left him to continue 
his dignified protest without any further unwarranted 
meddling on my part. 



January 24, 1920. — "My attention has been called," 
writes John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York 
Society for the Suppression of Vice, "to a paragraph 
of your article in the Tribune of January 21, wherein 
you refrain from blaming H. 3rd for crying, because 
among other things, he 'lives in a state which has re- 
cently suspended five duly elected assemblymen, and 
in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the med- 
dlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression 
of Vice.' 

"I assume that H. 3rd is too young to appreciate 
the contents of any publication, but some day he will 
be old enough, and no doubt his character will be 
molded and his conduct controlled, in a measure, by 
what he reads and the thoughts suggested by such 
reading. That is the usual thing. 

"If, when H. 3rd or any other young person, 
reached the age of understanding a stranger came into 
the home and attempted to entertain the young mind 
with stories and suggestions such as are contained in 



102 1 Seeing Things at Night 

the book in question, whoever had in charge the moral 
welfare of the young person would no doubt be very- 
indignant and the stranger would be expelled forth- 
with. We cannot properly have a rule for the pro- 
tection of our own and fail to extend that protection 
to others." 

Mr. Sumner is incorrect in his assumption that any 
stranger who told H. 3rd such merry and gorgeous 
stories as those of Jurgen would be expelled forthwith 
by "whoever had in charge the welfare of the young 
person." To be sure, this description hardly fits us. 
We mean to have as little to do with the morals of 
H. 3rd as possible. It seems to us a sorry business 
for parents to hand down their own morals, with a 
tuck here and a patch there, arid expect a growing 
child to wear them with any comfort. Let the child 
go out and find his own morals. 

But if H. 3rd went out and found Jurgen and read 
it at the age of adolescence, or thereabouts, it might 
be excellent literature for him. After all, a boy has to 
learn the facts of sex some time or other, and Cabell 
has been felicitious enough in Jurgen to present them 
not only as beautiful, but merry as well. Those ele- 
ments ought to be present in everybody's sex educa- 
tion. The new knowledge comes to almost all young- 
sters as a distinct shock, because, while the things 
their boy companions tell them may be merry enough, 
they are also sufficiently gross to be distinctly harm- 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 103 

f ul in a number of cases ; and, if their parents tell them 
it is either in some form so highly poetic that it means 
nothing, or as something decidedly grim and solemn as 
Sunday School. In either case this knowledge is apt 
to be regarded as something of which to be ashamed, 
and it seems to us that the world is just beginning to 
realize that shame is almost the most destructive of all 
the evil forces in the world. And so, unless our opin- 
ions change, we shall continue to pray each night, "Oh 
God, please keep all shame out of the heart and mind 
of H. 3rd." 



March 10, 1920. — Some little time ago we were 
asked what method we were going to use to instil moral 
ideas into the head of H. 3rd. We said then that we 
rather hoped that he would be able to get along, for a 
while at any rate, without any. We felt that it was the 
last thing in the world concerning which we wanted to 
be dogmatic. Unfortunately, the moral sense seems 
to arise early. Already H. 3rd is constantly inquiring 
"Good boy, dada?" Usually this comes after he has 
chipped the furniture or broken some of the china. 

Of course, we ought not to answer him. We have no 
idea whether he is a good boy or not. The marks of 
his destruction are plain enough, but without knowing 
his motives we can't pass on his conduct. We were 
slightly annoyed when he broke the lamp, but perhaps 
it was no more than pardonable curiosity on his part. 



104 Seeing Things at Night 

Perhaps it was wanton. How can we tell? And yet, 
it is impossible to preserve neutrality. After the fif- 
teenth or sixteenth reiteration of the query we always 
say, "Yes, you are a good boy," and then he goes away 
satisfied. But we are not. He is beginning to make 
us feel like the Supreme Court or Moses. It's too 
much responsibility. 



March 12, 1920. — "Your troubles are just begin- 
ning," writes M. B. "H. 3rd knew he was a bad boy 
when he broke that lamp. He has simply been testing 
your moral sense, which for some months he has sus- 
pected of being inadequate. I foresee that you will be 
a great disappointment to him as time goes on. In 
twelve years or so he will find your political views un- 
sound and your literary tastes decadent. I doubt 
whether he will approve of the way you spend Sunday. 

"You may think you can retain his affection, if not 
his respect, by keeping clear of the arbitrary methods 
of a bygone generation. Alas! I don't think there is 
even that hope for the radical parent of a conservative 
child. By the time H. 3rd has grown to adolescence 
he will feel that dogmatism is a sine qua non of parent- 
hood, and he will wish that he had had a real father. 
He may even resolve to have military discipline in his 
home. 

"I am sorry. I wish I could see brighter things for 
you in the days to come. Please forgive the imperti- 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 105 

nence of this prophecy. It has been wrung from the 
experience of one who has been condemned out of the 
mouth of fourteen as a socialist, a pacifist and (if he 
had known the word) a pagan." 

We have feared as much. Already we have found 
that we do not know the child. A week ago we were 
delighted when he picked up a pocketbook and, with a 
scornful exclamation of "Money!" threw it far across 
the room. "He will be an artist," we said, but last 
Saturday morning he came charging down upon the 
crap game loudly shouting, "I want a dollar!" He 
had to be forcibly restrained from gathering up the en- 
tire stake — it was two dollars and not one — which lay 
upon the floor. We were so disconcerted by the reve- 
lation of his spirit that we threw twelve twice and 
failed on an eight. Of course, that is not the thing 
which disturbs us. We fear that H. 3rd will grow 
up to be a business man. As such, of course, he may 
become the support of our old age, but we shall con- 
sider support more than earned if it entails our receiv- 
ing with our allowance a monthly homily on the reason 
and cure for unrest. 



April 6, 1920. — Some time ago I wrote a bitter at- 
tack on H. 3rd, the reactionary, in which I stated 
that his political emotions made it necessary for his 
parents to avoid the use of "proletariat" and such 
words except when disguised by the expedient of spell- 



106 Seeing Things at Night 

ing out a p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t." And it is only fair to 
say that the device takes a good deal of the zest out of 
sedition. I also stated at the time that we had been 
able to keep the picture of Trotzky over the mantel- 
piece in the red room by mendaciously telling H. 3rd 
that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler. 

It now becomes necessary for me to make a public 
apology to H. 3rd. It is perhaps a tasteless proceed- 
ing for me to drag his private political views into print, 
but the retraction ought to have as much publicity as 
the original slander. H. 3rd is not a reactionary. He 
is a liberal. It would have been perfectly safe for us 
to have said "proletariat" right out and to have con- 
fessed the identity of Trotzky. H. 3rd might not 
have been altogether in support, but he would have 
been interested. 

I discovered that he was a liberal early on Sunday 
morning while we were walking in Central Park. We 
happened to go near the merry-go-round and H. 3rd, 
drawn by the strains of "Dardanella," dragged me eag- 
erly toward the pavilion. I supposed, of course, that 
he wanted to ride and had just time to strap him on 
top of a camel before the platform began to move. No 
sooner were we in motion round and round, slow at 
first and then faster and faster as the revolutions in- 
creased in violence, than H. 3rd began to cry. As 
soon as possible I lifted him back to the firm and stable 
ground and briskly started to walk away from the 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 107 

scene of his harrowing experience. I thought he 
wanted to get as far away from it as possible, but after 
a few steps I noticed that he was not following me. 
Instead he was hurrying back to the merry-go-round 
as fast as his legs would carry him. "Perhaps," I 
thought, "he intends to discipline his will and is going 
to ride that merry-go-round again just because he is so 
much afraid of it." I knew that people sometimes did 
things like that because I had read it in The Research 
Magnificent. H. 3rd is not among them. He howled 
louder than before when I tried to put him on the 
camel again. I even tested the fantastic possibility that 
it was the camel and not the carrousel to which he ob- 
jected, but he yelled just as vigorously when offered a 
horse and later a unicorn. 

Then, I ceased to interfere and resolved to watch. 
When the merry-go-round began to whirl H. 3rd 
edged up closer and closer with a look of the most in- 
tense interest which I have ever seen on his face. He 
was fascinated by the sight of men, women and chil- 
dren engaged in a wild and, perhaps, a debauching ex- 
periment. Hitherto he had observed that people went 
forward and back in reasonably straight lines, but this 
progress was flagrantly rotary. I could not get him 
away. He stood his ground firmly. He would not re- 
treat a step, nor would he go any nearer. In fact, he 
was already so close to the carrousel that he could have 
leaped on board with no more than a hop. By leaning 



108 Seeing Things at Night 

just a little he could have touched it. But he did 
neither. He preferred a combination of the closest pos- 
sible proximity and stability. And after a while I 
realized just what it was of which he reminded me. He 
was an editor of The New Republic watching the Rus- 
sian Revolution. The mad whirling thing lay right at 
his feet, but his interest in it and even its imminence 
never disturbed his tranquillity. The lines of communi- 
cation with the safe and sane rear remained unbroken. 
He could retreat the minute the carrousel attempted 
to become overly familiar. 

And so we knew that H. 3rd was and is a liberal. 



April 18, 1920.- — The nurse said that H. 3rd had 
a fight in the park with one of his little playmates and 
won it. She was proud and partisan. 

"Woodie," she said, using the fearful nickname 
which has fastened itself upon the child, "wanted to 
play with Archie's fire engine, and Archie wouldn't let 
him. Woodie hit him in the mouth and made it bleed, 
and Archie cried." 

I said "Tut, tut." 

"I think it's right," said the nurse. "I think chil- 
dren ought to stand up for their rights." 

"But, after all," I reminded her, "it was Archie's 
fire engine." 

"Archie's older than Woodie," she said; "he's two 
and a half and he's bigger." 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 109 

"That sort of justification," I objected, "if carried 
far enough, would lead straight to criminal anarchy. 
After all, the bituminous miners might say that Mr. 
Palmer was bigger than they are." 

"We didn't think they'd fight," she said, cleverly 
dodging the larger implications of the discussion. "We 
were watching them, and all of a sudden Woodie swung 
his left hand and hit Archie in the mouth." 

"Which hand?" I exclaimed. 

"His left hand," she said. 

"Are you sure?" I insisted. 

"Why, yes, sir. Didn't you ever notice Woodie 
always picks up things with his left hand?" 

Before, I had been the cool, impartial judge, but it 
was impossible to maintain that attitude. In a mo- 
ment I had become again the parent, human and fallible 
to emotion. I motioned to the nurse to leave me. I 
wanted to be alone with my problem. I must face the 
fact with as much courage as I could muster. There 
seemed to be no shadow of doubt from which hope 
could spring. I was the father of a southpaw. 



April 20, 1920. — We decided not to let H. 3rd 
play with lead soldiers, for fear they might inculcate 
a spirit of militarism. Instead, he received an illumi- 
nated set of Freedom Blocks. We remember that 
among the titles were "Bill of Rights," "Free Speech," 
"Magna Charta" and "Habeas Corpus." The blocks 



no Seeing Things at Night 

have not been altogether a success. The set is badly 
depleted, for the child licked all the paint off "Free 
Speech" and threw "Habeas Corpus" out of the win- 
dow. 



April 2.1, 1920. — Although we don't know the exact 
legal form, we think we have seen announcements of 
somewhat the same sort. At any rate, we want to 
advertise the fact that on and after this date we will 
not be responsible for persons who may be injured by 
falling objects while passing the apartment house on 
the west side of Seventh Avenue between Fifty-fifth 
and Fifty-sixth streets. Our first hint of the danger 
came when the hairbrush disappeared and could not be 
found. That was only circumstantial evidence, but on 
Monday we caught him in the act of tossing out a hand 
mirror. 

It was our idea to dissuade him by trying to make 
him understand that breaking mirrors is bad luck, but 
R. says that it is best not to plant any superstitions in 
the undeveloped mind of a child. The best we could 
do was to take the mirror away and shadow him closely. 
But yesterday a bronze vase disappeared and two 
books. So far no casualties have been reported. Al- 
though we live on the fifth floor, I don't believe the 
books could have hurt anybody very much. They 
were light fiction, but the vase is different. We told 
M. not to leave the stove unguarded for a moment, 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 11 1 

and we are seeking to perfect a device to padlock the 
piano to the wall. As yet we have reached no plan to 
guard the books. Probably the best we can do is to 
allow any passerby who is hit and hurt to keep the 
book. Of course, the point naturally arises as to 
whether a passerby who has been hit with the second 
volume of Gibbon's Rome has a right to demand the 
whole set. We rather think there would be justice in 
that. At any rate, we are not disposed to be petty 
about the matter, because we realize that from the fifth 
floor even a single volume of Gibbon might be deadly. 

A. W., who is frivolous, suggests that we lock up all 
but a certain number of suitable books which we shall 
allow H. 3rd to throw out the window without in- 
terference. His list includes The Rise and Fall of the 
Dutch Republic, The Descent of Man, La Debacle, 
The Fall and Rise of Susan Lennox, and then he would 
add, rather optimistically, we fear, It Never Can Hap- 
pen Again. 

What is getting into children these days, anyway? 
Frankly, we view their conduct with alarm. That 
spirit of destruction and unrest seems to have gripped 
them all. Where do they get it? Why has the Lusk 
committee failed to act in the matter? To us it seemi 
a clear case of Bolshevist propaganda. 



April 23, 1920. — H. 3rd handed me a pencil and 
then stood around as if he expected me to do something 



H2 Seeing Things at Night 

with it. I didn't suppose he wanted me to commit my- 
self in writing about any recent plays or books, and I 
guessed that he desired something more pictorial. I 
drew a face and showed it to him. It wasn't any face 
in particular and I didn't know whether to call it the 
Spirit of the Ages or a young Jugo-Slav artillery officer. 
H. 3rd looked at it with interest and promptly said 
"baybay." 

I let it go at that and was pleased that he had caught 
the general intent of the work. Unfortunately, I tried 
to show my versatility, and the next head was stuck 
underneath a pompadour and on top of a rather elab- 
orate gown. But again he called it "baybay." I 
added trousers, a walking stick, a high hat, a fierce 
scowl and put a long pipe in the mouth, but he could 
see no difference. It was still a "baybay." 

I was put in the quandary of setting H. 3rd down 
as a little unintelligent or stigmatizing my art as in- 
effective, until I suddenly came upon the correct ex- 
planation. These pictures of mine were direct, naive, 
unspoiled by any theory of life or composition. They 
were the natural expression of a creative impulse. In 
them was the spirit of spring, and freshets, and early 
birds, and saplings, and What Every Young Man Ought 
to Know and all that sort of thing. "Baybay," said 
H. 3rd, and he was quite right. I couldn't fool him 
by putting Peter Pan in long trousers. 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 113 

May 5, 1920. — This is the story of the low-cut lady 
and the lisping tot. It is contained in The Menace of 
Immorality, by the Rev. John Roach Straton, in a 
chapter entitled "Slaves of Fashion": 

"I once heard one of the most famous reform 
workers of this city explain why she gave up low-cut 
gowns," writes Dr. Straton. "She explained how she 
was ready to start for the theater one night in such a 
dress, when her little boy of five said to her, 'But, 
mother, you are not going that way? You are not 
dressed.' And then, with trembling voice, she told us 
how all the evening through, as she sat in the play- 
house she kept hearing that sweet childish voice say- 
ing 'Not dressed! Not dressed! Not dressed!' until 
at last, with the blush of shame mantling to her cheeks, 
and with the realization that a Christian mother should 
dress differently from the idle and godless women of 
the world, she drew her cloak about her and went 
home, dressed — or rather undressed — for the last time 
in such a costume!" 

Nothing we have read in a month has been quite so 
disturbing to us as this simple little tale. Before it our 
theories tremble and fall. Upon many an occasion 
we have set down the conviction that little children 
should never be spanked under any provocation what- 
soever. And yet if we had been that lowcut lady we 
would certainly have given that interfering and priggish 
little youngster a walloping. Even in the case of 



H4 Seeing Things at Night 

H 3rd we are minded to make an exception in our 
program. He may rampage and roar and destroy with- 
out laying himself open to corporal punishment, but he 
will do very well to refrain from any comment of any 
sort about our clothes or personal appearance. We do 
not purpose to come home in our cloak from any show 
with our evening entirely spoiled by the fact that a 
sweet childish voice has been saying in our ear, "Not 
shaved! Not shaved! Not shaved!" 



June 3, 1920. — Of late I am beginning to notice 
with perturbation a distinctly sentimental streak in 
H. 3rd. Nothing else will account for his tenderness 
toward Goliath. When we first began to talk about him 
he was treated by common consent rather scornfully. 
He was known to us as "Ole Goliath he talks too 
much." Even in those early days it cannot be said 
that Goliath was treated with special spite, for as the 
story grew in the telling he fared not much worse than 
David. Somehow or other I eventually came into the 
incident myself. Just now I can't remember whether 
it was at the special invitation of H. 3rd or my own 
egotistic urge. 

At any rate, it seems that David, after knocking 
Goliath down, grew overbearing in his attitude to all the 
world. Goliath, it must be explained, was not killed, 
since death would involve explanations beyond the 
comprehension of H. 3rd. Goliath was merely hit in 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 115 

the chest and fell. The chest was stressed, since it is 
necessary every now and then to halt H. 3rd in his 
most playful moments with the admonition that hitting 
casual visitors in the face is not a friendly act. We 
pride ourselves on our old-fashioned Brooklyn hospi- 
tality. 

However, as we had said, David followed up his 
victory with the boast, "I can beat any man in the 
world," at which point H. 3rd is supposed to chime 
in, "And lick 'em." In response to this challenge Hey- 
wood 2d appeared, and when David picked up an- 
other rock and threw it H. 2d cleverly put up his 
hands and caught the missile. He threw it back at 
David and knocked him down. Rollo offered the fur- 
ther amendment that he himself then appeared and 
knocked Heywood 2d down. "And," he told the 
child, "I didn't need a rock. I used a snappy retort." 

He even went so far as to draw a picture of the oc- 
currence, but it met with no favor from H. 3rd, who 
exclaimed, "Heywood second did not fell. He did not 
fell." 

I was much touched by this display of loyalty until 
I found that his feelings were just as much engaged 
in the fate of Goliath. This love of his for the Philis- 
tine he indicated suddenly one evening when he asked 
me to tell him the story of "Sweet Goliath," and I 
found that nothing would satisfy him but the complete 
revision of the whole tale to the end that it should be 



Ii6 Seeing Things at Night 

Goliath who picked up the rock and vanquished David. 
I have tried to lure him away from this unauthorized 
version in vain. Only to-day I suggested hopefully 
"That ole Goliath he talks too much." H. 3rd looked 
at me severely, but then his face brightened, and with 
all the unction of a missionary to China he said, "Goli- 
ath loves you." 



June ii, 1920. — "Perhaps you can answer the chal- 
lenge to American educational institutions contained 
in this letter from H. G. Wells," writes Floyd Dell. "I 
can't (neither am I able to think of anything to reply 
to the question which he counters to my Were You 
Ever a Child?'— Were You Ever a Parent?' But that 
won't embarrass you)." 

I'm afraid that by dint of writing now and again 
about H. 3rd I have managed to pass myself off as a 
chronic parent. For all the assurance with which I 
have put forth certain theories on the care and educa- 
tion of the young, many of them mere reflections of 
Dell's book, I admit at the outset no qualification to 
answer the challenge of Wells even if I were sure that 
an answer were possible. For all I know H. 3rd will 
grow up to rob a bank and curse me that he was not 
spanked with due moralizing and ceremony three times 
a week. However, the letter from Wells is as follows: 

"Dear Floyd Dell: Yours is a good, wise book — so 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 117 

far. But there is a devil — several devils — of indolence 
in a child. Have you ever been a parent? That too 
is useful. 

"Do you know anything of modern English public 
schools? How many Americans do? You know of 
Beedale's and Abbotsholm, crank schools, but you 
know nothing of Audle. Have you ever heard of 
Audle? Audle has 500 boys (two of mine). No class 
teaching practically, boys working in research groups, 
big botanical gardens, library, concert hall, picture gal- 
lery, big engineering laboratories and a good biological 
one. Boys encouraged to read stuff like The Libera- 
tor and me. Sex via biology (see Joan and Peter). 
This isn't 1947. This is now. Wake up America!" 

"I ought perhaps to add," writes Dell in a postscript, 
"that the handwriting of my fellow member of the ad- 
visory council of the Association for the Advance- 
ment of Progressive Education is a peculiar hiero- 
glyphic which it is sometimes almost impossible to de- 
cipher. Thus, I am not quite sure whether he says 
my book 'is a good, wise book/ or something quite 
different. Some of my friends who have seen the let- 
ter think that he says it is 'a God-awful book.' The 
hieroglyphics transliterate equally well either way. 
But I do not think that particular descriptive phrase 
is used in England. Anyway, you can take your 
choice. " 

If Floyd Dell can't think up anything to say in de- 



Ii8 Seeing Things at Night 

fense of American educational methods I'm sure I 
can't. It seems to me that almost without exception 
our schools are devoted to that process called "large 
scale production." 

"I can tell any graduate of your school at a glance," 
said a man in my hearing. "They all bear your stamp 
unmistakably." 

And the schoolmaster grinned with delight. 

Practically all our institutions of learning are finish- 
ing schools. We are told, for instance, that the modern 
public school aims to turn out ioo per cent Americans. 
It seems to me that 98 or even 97 per cent would be 
better. That would leave the child some margin for 
growth and development based on actual experience 
rather than piecept. I'm afraid that the 100 per cent 
may represent nothing more than something poured in 
by the teacher, and I doubt if many of our educators 
are sure enough of eye and hand to stop exactly at the 
minute notch marked 100. There is always the danger 
that a little too much will be poured in and something 
will be spilled over, for when a man becomes 101 or 
102 per cent American he must soon dispose of the 
surplus. He may take it to Mexico in the train of a 
holy war or bayonet a path for it into Japan, and re- 
cently we have heard not a few around New York who 
seem to think highly of the possibility of a war to 
Americanize England. And, of course, the various 
agencies to deport, expel and imprison often represent 



H. 3rd — A Continuous Performance 119 

the activities of those who have more Americanism than 
they can carry like gentlemen. 

Not only is patriotism poured in at the top in our 
schools, but literature and art and everything else is 
administered in like fashion. The pupil is allowed to 
discover nothing for himself. "Here," says the teacher, 
"is a great book. Read it." And yet we wonder that 
when the boys and girls grow old enough to vote they 
usually follow the same order of boss or demagogue, 
who says, "Hylan is the people's friend; vote for him." 
In fact, we train a public which masses around cheer 
leaders. It follows the man with the megaphone, who 
shouts, "Now, boys, all together and nine long rahs on 
the end! " The rahs are the most important part of it. 
That is the point where the volume of sound swells 
greater and greater. 

It doesn't seem to me that there is much difference 
in the psychological processes of the followers of Ole 
Hansen and of Big Bill Haywood. They are merely 
on opposite sides of the field. The trouble with bring- 
ing up anybody on cheer leaders is that it is so easy for 
him to switch. The same man who tells you one day 
that this country must have law and order if it has to 
lynch every Socialist in the country to get it is just as 
likely to say the next month that this will never be a 
true democracy until it has a dictatorship of the prole- 
tariat. Not for a minute, mind you, would we suppress 
the cheering squads or their leaders. Personally, we 



120 Seeing Things at Night 

have no desire to see a social revolution. Our hold- 
ings, which include two Liberty bonds, twenty shares 
of American Drug Syndicate and one share of pre- 
ferred stock in The Liberator, incline us to conserva- 
tism. It seems to us that we property-holders who 
want the world to go on without convulsions should 
urge a policy which would permit those who want to 
holler to go on hollering and at the same time rope off 
some section under the grandstand for those who just 
want to talk. 

Audle, the home of the Wells children, must be a 
good school. Very probably it is better than anything 
in America. And yet we are not willing to accept it as 
the last word. It terrifies us a little by its efficiency. 
If H. 3rd goes to Audle's we know he'll come home to 
ask us questions which we can't possibly answer and 
he'll build toy factories and bridges in the front hall 
for us to trip over. Out of Audle's will come men to 
make these toys real — men who will tunnel mountains 
and frighten rivers out of their courses. Others will 
harry germs and compose symphonies and perhaps 
some will write huge stacks of novels as high as those 
of Wells himself. 

Nevertheless, we are a little distressed when Wells 
speaks so impatiently of the devil of indolence in a 
child. We wonder whether he may not mean the 
child's invariable desire to do something other than 
that suggested by parent or teacher. There have been 



H. Jrd — A Continuous Performance 121 

times when H. 3rd has refused my most earnest pleas 
that he ride his kiddie car up and down the hall. Still, 
it would hardly be fair to call him indolent simply be- 
cause he preferred to beat against the front window 
with a tablespoon. It takes ever so much energy to 
do that, particularly if you keep it up as long as H. 
3rd does. We are not quite ready to believe that it is 
essential to exorcise the devil, even if he is one of sheer 
indolence. Naturally it is repugnant to a man like 
Wells, who realizes so keenly the necessity for us all 
to get together and do something for the world. There 
is no denying that it was a rush job. But, after all, 
God created man in His image. Some of us have the 
spirit which animated Him during those terrific six 
days, but we wonder whether the world has no place, 
and never will have any place, for those others who 
emulate the God who rested and talked a little, per- 
haps, and sat around and remembered and dreamed 
and never lifted a finger to add as much to the world 
as one more fly or another blade of grass. 



June 15, 1920. — "Heywood Broun 3rd," writes a 
correspondent who signs no name, "is, fortunately for 
him, a very young son; Heywood Broun is a very 
young father — both will grow up. May the boy grow 
in grace free from Jurgen's influence and may the 
father find his materialism Dead Sea fruit in time to 
set such an example that H. B. 3rd will act upon the 



122 Seeing Things at Night 

Fifth Commandment. It can't be done on smutty fic- 
tion or carnal knowledge." 

It may be, as the writer suggests, that we shall grow 
in grace. However, that is beside the point, for, in 
the words of the beautiful christening service, a child 
takes his father "for better or worse." Even now we 
are of the opinion that all the Commandments should 
be observed in decent moderation. We think we are 
correct in assuming that the Fifth is, "Honor thy father 
and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the 
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." We intend 
to serve notice on H. 3rd not to make this his favorite 
Commandment. If he must break one of them, by all 
means let it be the Fifth. Even though we become 
much better than we are now, it is going to make us 
distinctly uncomfortable if he goes about the house 
honoring us. It will seem too ridiculous, and we doubt 
very much if he can do it with a straight face. When- 
ever he feels that he simply must honor his parents we 
hope that he will do it in an underhand way behind our 
backs. Although we hope never to spank him, he will 
be running a great risk if he makes his honoring frank 
and flagrant. 

And, anyway, why should he want to? Hasn't he 
got Jack the Giant Killer, and Dick Whittington, and 
Aladdin and Captain Kidd? Let him honor them. 
They are all too dead and too deserving to be an- 
noyed by it. 



Southpaws 

Our text to-day is from the fifteenth verse of the 
third chapter of the Book of Judges, in which it is 
written: "And afterwards they cried out to the Lord, 
who raised them up a saviour called Aod, the son of 
Gera, the son of Jemini, who used the left hand as well 
as the right." 

As a matter of fact, it seems probable that the old 
chronicler was simply trying to spare the feelings of 
Aod by describing him merely as an ambidextrous 
person, for there is later evidence, in the Book of 
Judges, that Aod actually favored his left hand and 
was — to be blunt and frank — just a southpaw. 

Aod, as you may remember, was sent to Eglon, the 
king of Moab, ostensibly to bear gifts from the Chil- 
dren of Israel, but, in reality, to kill the oppressor. 
"Aod," continues the vivid scriptural narrative, "went 
in to him: now he was sitting in a summer parlor alone, 
and he said: I have a word from God to thee. And 
he forthwith rose up from his throne. And Aod put 
forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right 
thigh, and thrust it into his belly with such force that 
the haft went in after the blade into the wound, and 
was closed up with the abundance of fat." 

When some great scholar comes to write the long- 

123 



124 Seeing Things at Night 

neglected book entitled A History of Lefthanders From 
the Earliest Times, it may well be that Aod will be 
discovered to be the first of the great line to be defi- 
nitely identified in ancient history. He is the only left- 
hander mentioned by name in the Bible, although this 
physical condition — or is it a state of mind — is referred 
to in another chapter (Judges 20) in which we hear 
of a town which seems to have been inhabited entirely 
by lefthanders. At any rate the Bible says: "The in- 
habitants of Gabaa, who were seven hundred most val- 
iant men, fighting with the left hand as well as with 
the right and slinging stones so sure that they could hit 
even a hair, and not miss by the stone's going on 
either side." 

It is interesting to note that these lefthanders are 
again described as ambidextrous, but it is safe to as- 
sume that they too were in reality southpaws. It may 
even be that Gabaa was a town specially set aside for 
lefthanded people, a place of refuge for a rather unde- 
sirable sort of citizen. 

This surmise is made in all seriousness, for there 
was a time in the history of the world when lefthanded- 
ness was considered almost a crime. Primitive man 
was unquestionably ambidextrous, but, with the growth 
of civilization, came religious and military customs 
and these necessitated at certain points in drill or cere- 
monial a general agreement as to which hand should 
be used. Man, for some reason unknown, chose the 



Southpaws 125 



right. That is why ninety per cent of the people in 
the world to-day are righthanded. Then with the de- 
velopment of business there soon came to be a conven- 
tionally correct hand for commerce. Early dealings of 
a business nature were carried on by men who held the 
shield in the left hand and bargained with the right. 
The shield proved convenient in case the deal fell 
through. Men who reversed the traditional use of the 
hands were regarded as queer folk or even a little worse 
than that. After all, lefthandedness was impious in 
religion, subversive to discipline in military affairs and 
unlisted in business. It is not to be wondered at then 
that there is testimony that centuries ago lefthanded 
children were severely beaten and the offending arm 
often tied down for years. 

And yet the southpaw has persisted in spite of per- 
secution. The two men most widely known in America 
to-day are both lefthanded. I assume that nobody will 
dispute the preeminence in fame of Charlie Chaplin 
and Babe Ruth, both of whom are completely and fer- 
vently lefthanded. And to top that off it may be added 
that the war was won by a lefthander, Marshal Ferdi- 
nand Foch, a southpaw, or, as the French have it, 
gaucher. 

It is interesting to note that the prejudice against 
lefthandedness has manifested itself and endures in 
our language. We speak of forbidding things as "sin- 
ister," and of awkward things as "gauche," but we 



126 Seeing Things at Night 

lefthanders can afford to smile contemptuously at these 
insults knowing, as we do, that Leonardo da Vinci was 
one of us. Gauche indeed! 

On account of the extent and the duration of the ill 
will to lefthanders there has come to be definitely such 
a thing as a lefthanded temperament. This is no more 
than natural. The lefthander is a rebel. He is the 
descendant of staunch ancestors who refused to con- 
form to the pressing demands of the church, the army 
and the business world. Even today lefthanders are 
traditionally poor business men and Babe Ruth has 
been obliged to bring suit against the company with 
which he made a moving picture contract. They are 
apt to be political radicals, and it has been freely ru- 
mored that Charlie Chaplin is a Socialist. They are 
illogical or rather they rise above logic, as did Foch 
in his famous message: "My left is broken, my right 
has been driven back, I shall attack at dawn." That is 
a typically lefthanded utterance. It has in it all of the 
fine rebellion of folk who have refused to conform even 
to such hard things as facts. If the sculptor had been a 
little more astute the lady who stands at the entrance 
of our harbor would have borne the torch aloft in her 
left hand. Liberty is a southpaw. 

So strong is the effect of the left hand upon the tem- 
perament that it may even be observed in the case of 
converts. Such an instance is afforded by the case of 
Daniel Vierge, the great Spanish artist, and by the re- 



Southpaws 127 



cent conduct of James M. Barrie, a righthander of 
years standing, who finally developed writer's cramp 
and switched to the use of the left hand. What hap- 
pened? He wrote Mary Rose, a play which deals sym- 
bolically with death and, instead of giving his audiences 
the conventional Barrie message of hope and charm 
and sweetness, he straightway set forth the doctrine 
that the dead didn't come back and that if they did 
they and the folk they left behind couldn't get on at all. 
Time, said the new Barrie, destroys all things, even 
the most ardent of affections. This was a strange and 
startling doctrine from Barrie. It was a lefthanded 
message. 

To-day, of course, lefthanders are pretty generally 
received socially; occasionally they are elected to of- 
fice, and there is no longer any definite provision 
against intermarriage. But anybody who thinks that 
prejudice has died out completely has only to listen to 
a baseball player when he remarks: "Why him — he's 
a lefthander!" There is also the well authenticated 
story of a young lefthanded golfer in our Middle West 
who played a match with Harry Vardon, in which he 
made a brilliant showing. Indeed, the youngster was 
so much elated that at the end of the round he asked 
the great pro.: "Who's the best lefthanded golfer you 
ever saw?" "There never was one that was worth a 
damn," answered Vardon sourly. 

The estimate is not quite fair, for Brice Evans is 



128 Seeing Things at Night 

lefthanded and, though it seems hardly patriotic to 
dwell upon it, our own Chick Evans was put out of the 
English amateur championship several years ago by 
Bruce Pierce, a southpaw from Tasmania. Still, left- 
handed golfers of any consequence are rare. Football 
has a few southpaw or rather southfoot heroes. Vic- 
tor Kennard won a game against Yale for Harvard 
with a leftfooted field goal. He and Felton were two 
of Harvard's greatest punters, and both of them were 
leftfooted kickers. There must have been some others, 
but the only one I can think of at the moment was 
Lefty Flynn of Yale, who was hardly a great player. 

Almost all boxers adopt the conventional right- 
handed form of standing with the left arm advanced, 
but Knockout Brown, for a few brief seasons, puzzled 
opponents by boxing lefthanded. He jabbed with his 
right and kept his left hand for heavy work. Of all 
the men nominated as possibilities for the international 
polo match only one is lefthanded, Watson Webb, the 
American, and one of the greatest and prettiest horse- 
men that America has turned out in many a year. In 
tennis we have done better, with Norman Brookes, 
Lindley Murray, Dwight Davis and Beals Wright. 

But the complete triumph of the lefthander comes 
in baseball. Tris Speaker, greatest of outfielders and 
manager of the world's champion Cleveland Indians, 
is lefthanded. So is Babe Ruth, the home run king, 
and George Sisler, who led the American League in 



Southpaws 129 



batting. Ty Cobb, like the Roman emperor before 
whom Paul appeared, is almost persuaded. He bats 
lefthanded. Almost half the players in both leagues 
adopt this practice since it gives them an advantage 
of about six feet in running to first base. And yet, in 
spite of this fact, thousands of meddling mothers all 
over the country are breaking prospective lefthanders 
into dull, plodding, conventional righthandedness. 
Babe Ruth was fortunate. He received his education 
in a protectory where the good brothers were much too 
busy to observe which hand he used. His spirit was 
not broken nor his natural proclivities bent. Accord- 
ingly he made fifty-four home runs last season and 
earned over one hundred thousand dollars. The world 
has sneered at us all too long. Even a lefthander will 
turn in time. 



Michael 

The man who gave us Michael said that he was a 
Shetland terrier. Frankly, I don't believe there is any 
such thing; unless Michael is it. But there is no deny- 
ing a Scotch strain of some sort. There is a good deal 
of John Knox about Michael. He recognizes no middle 
ground. There was no difficulty, for instance, in con- 
vincing Michael of the wickedness of some manifesta- 
tions of the grossness which is mortality, but it has 
been impossible to make him accept any working com- 
promise such as those by which men and dogs live. 
He can see no reason why there should be any geo- 
graphical limits or bounds to badness. 

There is a certain fierce democracy in that. Michael 
thinks no less of a backyard or a sidewalk than he 
does of a parlor. Or perhaps it would be better to say 
he thinks no more of a parlor. Repentance comes to 
him more easily than reformation. And yet I have an 
enormous respect for Michael's point of view as I un- 
derstand it. He doesn't want to burn, of course, but he 
has no patience with dogs who blandly hope to attain 
salvation by leading lamp-post lives. 

In some things I would have Michael more prac- 
tical. That man who brought him here said that his 
father was an excellent mouser. I have come to won- 

130 



Michael 13 1 



der whether the legitimacy of Michael is beyond ques- 
tion. Doubt struck me the other day in the kitchen 
when I saw an over-venturesome mouse clinging pre- 
cariously to a window curtain and swinging back and 
forth not more than a foot from the ground. 
"Look, Michael," I said, "it's a mouse!" 
I tried to say it with the same intensity as "Voila un 
sousmarin!" or "It's gold, pardner!" or something of 
the sort, but Michael looked at my finger instead of the 
mouse and wagged his tail. He backed away from 
me playfully and bounced around a little and barked. 
Indeed, he backed into the curtain and the tail of the 
mouse went swish, swish across his back, but Michael 
continued to wag. I have some little hope that this 
particular mouse will not come back for a time. He 
was visibly terrified, but of course it would be impos- 
sible to predict any permanent condition of shock. At 
any rate, by a supreme effort he mastered his panic. 
Wrenching himself loose from the curtain, he jumped 
and landed on Michael's back. Then he hopped to 
the floor and disappeared behind the potato barrel. 
Michael sat down slowly and scratched himself. 

Last week I thought I detected a real fusion of 
Michael's undoubted idealism and direct practical ac- 
tion. Somebody brought The New York American 
into the house and left it on the floor. When I came 
in I found that Michael had torn it to shreds. He had 
been particularly severe with the editorial page. I 



132 Seeing Things at Night 

patted him and gave him some warm milk. To-day I 
discovered he had mutilated a third edition of The Tri- 
bune. And upon inquiry I learned that he would chew 
almost anything except The New Republic. His 
teeth are not quite sharp enough for such heavy paper 
yet. It is just possible that there is some more subtle 
reason for the exception. Sometimes I think that 
Michael has a "New Republic" mind. 



Buying a Farm 

It began as "a farm," but even before the cata- 
logues arrived it was "the farm." Now we call it "our 
farm/' although the land is still in Spain abutting on 
the castle. Chiefly, the place is for Michael. The 
backyard is much too small for him, and too formal. 
He regards the house with affection, no doubt, but with 
none of that respect which he has for the backyard. 
He is, as you might say, thoroughly yard-broken. 
When he puts his paws against the front door and 
barks for freedom he would be a harsh person indeed 
who would refuse to plan a plantation, a large one, for 
him. Of course, there was H. 3rd to consider, also, 
but he seemed less restive. Things beyond the borders 
of. a pram are so foreign. 

By eliminating Maine, Ohio and all farms priced at 
more than twenty thousand dollars, we su'ceedea at 
length in narrowing the field of selection to three. One, 
which has the attractive name of Farm No. 97, is in 
Connecticut. It has "good American neighbors on all 
sides." It is only half a mile to some village, not 
specified. Four of the ten acres are tillable and the 
rest in timber. Since there are at least 250 cords of 
vvood bringing five to six dollars per cord, the author 

133 



134 Seeing Things at Night 

of the catalogue is entirely justified in the use of the 
phrase "ridiculously low" regarding the price of $1,500. 
The author of the catalogue goes on to say that "the 
owner is an aged widow/' and we have gathered the 
impression that the author means to intimate that she 
is not quite competent. This would explain the ridicu- 
lously low price. 

However, we wish to defend our motives in favoring 
Farm No. 97. It was not the opportunity to swindle 
a widow out of her homestead which tempted us, nor 
even the cordwood, but a single sentence almost at the 
bottom of the description. It read, "Aged owner, for 
quick sale, will include good mare that has paced a 
mile in 2:20." This would bring the village half a 
mile away within one minute and ten seconds, while the 
good American neighbors would be only seconds away. 

E was the deviPs advocate. "The description 

doesn't tell enough," she complained. "The 2:20 
doesn't mean anything unless it says 'track fast, start 
good, won driving/ or something like that. And I'd 
like to know who held the watch. I think we ought to 
know what year it was that she made that mile in 2 :2c 
Doesn't it say that the woman is an aged widow? 
Doesn't it stand to reason that she must have bought 
that fast mare some time in her forties, at least? Any- 
way, 2:20 isn't so very fast for a pacer. Dan Patch 
did it in less than two minutes." 

In default of more definite information about the 



Buying a Farm 135 

pacing mare, we turned to a farm called "Coin Money 
on a Bargain." This is an oyster farm, as it borders 
two thousand feet on the Patuxent River. The tillage, 
as the author says, "is loamy and fine for trucking.' 7 
It is well fruited to apples and grapes. I drew, as I 
thought, a rather attractive picture of a scene before 
the big open fireplace in the modern four-room bunga- 
low of "Coin Money on a Bargain." I pictured the 
group telling stories and roasting apples and stewing 
grapes and frying oysters over the embers. R in- 
terrupted to say that, without doubt, just as soon as 
H. 3rd began to crawl, he would fall into the river 
with the oysters. 

"Yes," said E , "and Michael would try and eat 

shells, and they'd disagree with him, like that coal he 
got hold of last night." 

I mentioned the fact that oysters cost from thirty to 
fifty cents for a half dozen portion, and spoke of the 
manner in which the shellfish could be crowded along a 
2,000-foot front. 

"Yes," said E , aggressively, "but how are you 

going to get them to market?" 

There I had her. "You have forgotten the descrip- 
tion," I remarked. "It says the farm is fine for truck- 
ing." 

But eventually it was a place called Only Nine Hun- 
dred Dollars Down to which we turned our attention. 
It lay up north along the Hudson and a man named 



136 Seeing Things at Night 

George F. Sweetser promised to show it off to pur- 
chasers. 

In the newspaper advertisement it merely said 
"George F. Sweetser, Real Estate Agent." Only after 
his letter came did we realize the sort of man with 
whom we had to deal. The letter was much more 
communicative than the advertisement. 

The left-hand half of the envelope read; "George 
F. Sweetser, Storm King on the Hudson, New York. 
Legalized expert judge of horses, cattle, poultry, fruits, 
etc. — pomologist and botanist — private scoring and 
mating poultry — starting judge of races — originator of 
Buff Brahmas — breeder of prize winning, standard 
bred poultry, cattle, etc. — superintendent of farm pro- 
duce and grain at New York State Fair." 

I was careful, therefore, to explain my business at 
the beginning. "I want to see a farm," I said. 

"I'm certainly glad to see you coming out this way," 
said the pomologist. "We want new blood. We want 
active, hard-working young fellows around here. We 
got too many amateurs and old fogies. Would you 
believe it, a lot of fellows around here won't use green 
fertilizer, even when I tell them about it." 

"No?" I said. 

"They just want to stick in the old rut and do things 
the way their grandfathers did before there was a war. 
Do you know what it is makes things grow?" 

"Rain," I suggested, after a long pause. 



Buying a Farm 137 

"Yes, rain, of course," said the originator of Buff 
Brahmas, "but nitrogen, too. And where do we get 
nitrogen?" 

"It comes from Chile, or Honduras, or some place 
down that way, doesn't it?" I hazarded. 

"No, sir," said the starting judge of races. "Up 
here in Putnam County we get it right out of the air. 
That's what green fertilizer does — just brings it right 
out of the air." 

And he reached up and clutched something, as if he 
was going to bring some down himself and show it to 
me. Instead, he let the gas drift away and pointed to a 
farm just across the road from the post-office. 

"Do you see that farm over there?" 

I nodded. 

"Well, that man took my advice and he got 440 
bushels of potatoes on two acres." 

I tried to think just how far 440 bushels of potatoes 
might stretch if French fried and placed end to end. 
It was beyond me. 

"That's a lot of potatoes," I murmured. 

"I'll say it is," answered Mr. Sweetser. "You know 
what potatoes were selling for last year?" he said ag- 
gressively. 

"Not last year," I answered. 

"Well, they were selling for $1.50 a bushel. I told 
that man over there to hold off a bit, but he didn't 
take my advice, and later on they sold for $2. It 



138 Seeing Things at Night 

wasn't such bad business, either, at $1.50. Do you 
know how much 440 bushels at $1.50 are?" 

I could do that one, and after awhile I said "$660." 

"Yes, sir," said Mr. Sweetser. "And this farm I got 
for sale is eighty-five acres. Now, suppose you put all 
that in potatoes. How much could you get?" 

"It would be a lot of money," I said, after a vain 
attempt to work it out in my head. 

"Not that I'd advise you to put it all in potatoes. 
There's cows and corn and berries and pigs. This is 
lovely country for pigs. You certainly owe it to your- 
self to have pigs. If I was a young man I'd just do 
nothing but pigs. And there's alfalfa. You can cut 
that three times a year, and you get about five tons 
to the acre. There was a man on a place right next to 
mine that put four and a half acres into corn and he 
got $349-70 for it." 

"How's the house?" I interrupted. 

"Oh, don't you bother about the house," said Mr. 
Sweetser. "It's comfortable. That's what I'd call it 
— comfortable. And I alius say you're not buying 
houses; they don't count for nothing in the long run; 
you're buying land. Even if that was an elegant house, 
you'd want to fix it up some way to suit yourself, 
wouldn't you? I'd like to show you the place this af- 
ternoon. There's good corn, and I know you'd enjoy 
seeing the rye and the pigs. But, you see, I'm kinder 
pressed for time. I'm superintendent of a big place 



Buying a Farm 139 

around here, and I got to look at that, and later on 
this afternoon I have to register the alien enemies — 
the women, you know — and to-night there's a meeting 
of the draft board. I guess I've told you enough, 
though, about what kind of land it is around here. 
Just look at this piece right here." 

He led the way across the road. 

"You wouldn't find finer soil than that if you was to 
drive all afternoon. Just look at it." And he kicked 
some of the rocks away so that I could get a closer 
view. 

"Why, the crops alone and the timber ought to pay 
for this place in a couple of months. Why, I'd just 
love to buy it myself if I was a young fellow and wasn't 
so busy. If you come up this way again let me know 
when to expect you, because I've got to go up and su- 
perintend a fair next Thursday, and on Friday I'm 
judging chickens, and Saturday the school board 
meets." 

It was at this point that fate took a hand in tire 
affairs of the busy Mr. Sweetser for no sooner had we 
got into the car and started for home than a tire blew 
out. 

I sat down under a tree to advise the real estate 
agent and watch him fix it. An old man from down 
the road also came over to watch. He was chewing 
a straw, and he wore a pair of suspenders called Samp- 
son. I asked about the weather first, and he said, 



140 Seeing Things at Night 

without much interest, that it had been too cool and 
too rainy. Then he took up the questioning. 

"What part of the country are you from?" he in- 
quired. 

I said New York, and added New York City. 

"Yes; I know," said the farmer. "I've been there. 
I saw the Hudson-Fulton celebration. I've seen about 
everything," he said, "I went to the San Francisco Ex- 
position." 

I nodded, and he went on: "Chicago was the first 
stop, and then we went through Kansas. Out of the 
window you could see wheat and corn all the way along. 
It was beautiful. And then by and by we came to 
the Rocky Mountains. They're mighty big mountains, 
and it took three engines to pull the train up. Some- 
times on the curves you could almost touch the en- 
gine. Every now and then we'd go through a tunnel. 
Then we went down south into the big desert. There 
was nothing there but sagebrush. And they took us 
up to the Grand Canyon. Did you ever see it?" he 
asked. 

I lied and said yes, but he went on: "The Grand 
Canyon's 123 miles long and twenty-five miles wide 
and one mile deep. I grabbed hold of a tree and 
looked over the edge, and down there at the bottom 
were all kinds of rocks, red and green and yellow, and 
there were horses' heads and horses' hoofs and barns 



Buying a Farm 141 

and castles and haystacks and everything better than 
an artist could have done." 

"I don't suppose you've seen any of these sub- 
marines around here," I interrupted, as a possible di- 
version. 

"Oh, yes; I've seen them," he said; "not here, but 
out at the San Francisco Exposition. They had sub- 
marines and floating mines. They're big. They look 
like an old-fashioned white turnip, and they float un- 
der the water, and when a ship strikes one it blows up. 
An' they had a big buildin' out at the fair as big as 
that barn, and in the middle of it was a butter-making 
machine, and it could turn out more butter in an after- 
noon than I get off this place in a year. An' there 
was a Tower of Jewels 425 feet high, and it had 15,635 
jewels on it from Persia. And they all shone in the 
sun. And they had flying machines, too. At night 
they put lights on 'em, and they went up in the air 
and turned somersaults over and over again. I 
wouldn't go up in one of 'em if you was to give me all 
that meadow land over there. 

"After we left the fair we went up north through the 
spruce forests, and they tell me now that the govern- 
ment's sent 8,000 men up there to cut that spruce and 
put it into the flying machines, an' I suppose some of 
those trees I saw are up in the air now turning somer- 
saults. 



142 Seeing Things at Night 

"We didn't stop agin till we got to Detroit. That's 
where they make the Fords, Tin Lizzies, they call 'em 
around here. But I always say, What difference does 
it make what they call 'em if they can do the work? 
I always say one of 'em's as good as a horse — as good 
as two horses. An' then we came back here and I've 
stuck around for a spell 'cause I think I've seen most 
everything there is." 

By that time the real estate agent had fixed the tire, 
and we drove away. The man with the Sampson sus- 
penders was looking rather contemptuously at his flock 
of sheep. They would never get to San Francisco. 

I can't remember now just why we didn't buy Only 
Nine Hundred Dollars Down but somehow or other 
the decision of the council went against it. Our atten- 
tion at present is fastened on a place over in New Jer- 
sey called One Man Farm Equipped. This, like so 
many of the attractive bargains in the advertisements , 
belongs to a widow. As the paragraph in the news- 
papers has it "Widow left alone will sell farm for 
$1,000 spot cash." E. thinks that delay in the matter 
may be fatal because of the cheapness of the price. 
"How can we tell," is the burden of her plaint, "that 
they will leave her alone?" 



Romance and Reticence 

Whenever a man remarks "I've had a mighty ad- 
venturous life, I have," we usually set him down as a 
former king of the Coney Island carnival or a recently 
returned delegate from an Elks' convention in Kansas 
City. It has been our somewhat bitter experience that 
the man who pictures himself as a great adventurer is 
almost invariably spurious. As a matter of fact, the 
rule holds good for great wits, great lovers and great 
drinkers. But it applies with particular pertinence to 
romantic folk. 

A wise professor at Harvard once remarked that he 
didn't believe that the ancients realized that they were 
ancients. We have somewhat the same feeling about 
quaint people and romantic people and adventurous 
people. 

Of course we must admit the existence in life and in 
literature of authentic but sophisticated romantic fig- 
ures. Cyrano was one and, to a lesser extent, d'Artag- 
nan. Porthos is on our side. But the best example we 
can remember is Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer pic- 
tured himself as a romantic figure. Huck didn't. 
When Huck went a-wandering he thought it was be- 
cause the store clothes the widow had given him were 
uncomfortable. It was actually another itch, but 

143 



144 Seeing Things at Night 

he did not know its name. This, to our mind is the 
essence of true adventure. When a man comes to rec- 
ognize romance he is in a position to bargain and par- 
ley. He is not the true adventurer. Things no longer 
just happen to him. He has to go out and seek them. 
He has lost his amateur standing. 

Huck, who didn't know what it was all about, had 
much more exciting adventures than Tom and he was a 
more fascinating figure in the happening. Jim would 
also come into our category of true adventurers, and, 
to skip back a bit, Tom Jones is almost type perfect. 
Just so Sancho Panza seems to us more fundamentally 
romantic than Don Quixote, and we have always been 
more interested in what happened to Doctor Watson 
than in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock 
foresaw things — and that is fatal to romance. 

The Prodigal Son belongs in our list, and Andrew 
Jackson, and Lot's wife, and Eddie Rickenbacker, and 
Lord Jim, and Ajax, and Little Red Riding Hood, and 
Thomas Edison ; and the father of the Katzenjammer 
Kids, and most of Bluebeard's wives and all the people 
who refused to go into the ark. 

While we are willing to admit that there are other 
types who are successfully romantic, in spite of self- 
consciousness, they are the exceptions. We are hardly 
willing to accept them in a group. This brings us to 
Mrs. Fiske's new play, Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans, at 
which we have been aiming throughout the article. 



Romance and Reticence 145 

There are nine characters in the play, and the author 
pictures each of them as being distinctly aware that he 
is an adventurous character, in a quaint garden, in a 
romantic city, in a mad story. It is true that these 
people do some romantic and adventurous things, but 
never without first predicting that they are going to be 
romantic, and then explaining after it is all over that 
they have been romantic. From our point of view 
there is too much challenge in this. Whenever a man 
or woman in a play or in life promises that he is about 
to d6 something quaint we have an irresistible desire 
to lay him 6 to 5 that it won't be any such thing. Then 
if the decision is left to us we always decide against 
him. 

The method of the preliminary puff and the subse- 
quent official confirmation is decidedly a mistake in the 
case of the character portrayed by Mrs. Fiske in Mis' 
Nelly, of N'Orleans. Mrs. Fiske showed herself quite 
capable of carrying the role of a spirited, romantic and 
adventurous belle, and it was unnecessary to have her 
triumph so carefully prepared in advance by the pre- 
dictions of her servants as to what she would do when 
she "got her Jim Crow up." 

We might have been content to accept some of the 
other characters as sure enough romantic figures if 
they had not been so confoundedly confident that they 
were. They fairly challenged us into disbelief. The 
author, to our mind, was wrong from the beginning in 



146 Seeing Things at Night 

describing his comedy on the program as a comedy of 
"moonshine, madness and make-believe." Moonshine 
and madness are both elusive stage qualities. An 
author is fortunate indeed if he can achieve them. He 
is foolish to take the risk of predicting them. If he 
succeeds in presenting authentic moonshine and mad- 
ness he will not need to inform the audience of the 
fact by means of the program and still less through 
his characters. Mis' Nelly, of WOrleans left us much 
more convinced of the make-believe. 

A play which affected us in somewhat similar 
fashion was The Gipsy Trail, produced here a sea- 
son or so ago. In this play the author presented a 
character who seemed to be a truly romantic figure 
for at least half the play. Then he was suddenly 
trapped into a confession that he was romantic. Some- 
body asked him about it, and, most unfortunately, 
he set out to prove that he was an adventurer in a 
long speech beginning "I have fried eggs on top of the 
Andes" or in some such manner, and from that mo- 
ment we grew away from him. We knew him as no 
true adventurer, but as a man who would eventually 
write a book or at best a series of articles for a Sun- 
day magazine. 

The real tragedy of romance is that any man who 
appreciates his own loses it. In this workaday world 
we can live only by taking in the other fellow's ad- 
ventures. 



A Robe for the King 

Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a story 
about the tailors who made a suit for a King out of a 
magic cloth. The quality of the cloth was such, so the 
tailors said, that it could be seen by nobody who was 
not worthy of the position he held. And so all the 
people at court declared that they could see the cloth 
and admired it greatly, but when the King went out 
to walk a little boy cried: "Why, he hasn't got any- 
thing on." Then everybody took up the cry, and the 
King rushed back to his palace, and the two tailors 
were banished in disgrace. Information has recently 
been discovered which casts new light on the story. 
According to this information there was only one tailor, 
and his adventure with the King was about as follows: 

An Imperial Footman — There's a man at the gate 
who says he's a tailor and that he wants to see your 
majesty. 

The King — Explain our constitution to him. Tell 
him that all bills for revenue originate in the lower 
House, and point out that on account of a vicious 
bipartisan alliance of all the traitors in the kingdom 
I'm kept so short of money that I can't possibly afford 
any new clothes. 

147 



148 Seeing Things at Night 

The Imperial Footman — He didn't say anything 
about money, your majesty. 

The King — Well, I won't give him a bealo down 
and a bealo a week either. Tell him to wait until I've 
got a clear title to the pianola. 

The Imperial Footman — What he said was that he 
had a valuable gift for the most enlightened ruler in 
the world. 

The King — Well, why didn't you say so in the first 
place? What was the use of keeping me waiting? 
Send him up right away. (Exit the Footman.) 

The King (speaking in the general direction of the 
Leading Republican) — Fortunately, my fame rises 
above petty slanders. The common people, they know 
me and they love me. 

The Leading Republican — They love your sim- 
plicity, your majesty, your lack of ostentation, your 
tractability. (Enter the Tailor.) 

The Tailor — I have come a far journey to see your 
majesty. 

The King — I am honored. 

The Tailor — For a long time I have been journey- 
ing to find an enlightened sovereign, a sovereign who 
was fitted in all respects for his high office. I stopped 
in Ruritania; he was not there. He was not in Pan- 
nonia or in Gamar. You are my hope, majesty. 

The King — I trust this may indeed be the end of 
your journey. I think I may say that Marma is a 



A Robe for the King 149 

model kingdom. As you doubtless know, the capital 
city is Grenoble, with a population of 145,000, accord- 
ing to the last census. We have modern waterworks, 
a library with more than 10,000 volumes, an art mu- 
seum, a tannery, three cathedrals, two opera houses 
and numerous moving picture theaters. The principal 
industries, as you may recall, are salt fish, woolen 
blankets, pottery, dried raisins and shrapnel. 

The Tailor — Your majesty will pardon me if I say 
that I don't give a fig for your raisins or your dried 
fish or the cathedrals, or even the library with the 
10,000 volumes. What I am seeking is a man with 
eyes to see. 

The King — No one has better eyes than myself, I'm 
sure. I have shot as many as a hundred pheasants in 
an afternoon, and, if you will pardon the allegorical 
allusion, I can see loyalty and virtue though they re- 
side in the breast of the most distant and humble sub- 
ject in my kingdom. 

The Tailor — Perhaps, then, you can see my cloth. 
It is a marvelous cloth. It was one of the gifts the 
wise men brought to the Child. It lay across his feet 
in the manger. But in order that its richness should 
not attract the attention of Herod, the wise men de- 
creed that the cloth should be invisible to every one 
who was not worthy of his station in the world. See, 
your majesty, and judge for yourself. {He puts his 
hand into the bag and brings it forth, apparently 



I jo Seeing Things at Night 

empty, although he seems to be holding up something 
for the King and the courtiers to admire.) Is it not 
a brave and gallant robe, gentlemen? 

(All look intently at the hand of the tailor. There 
is a long silence, in which many sly glances are cast 
from one to another to ascertain if it is possible that 
somebody else sees this thing which is invisible to him. 
The King looks slowly to the right and slowly to the 
left to scan the faces of his subjects, and then he gazes 
straight at the Tailor in high perplexity. Of a sudden 
the Leading Republican pulls himself together and 
speaks in an assured and certain tone.) 

The Leading Republican — It is a magnificent 
robe. It is a robe for a King. It is so fine a robe that 
no king should wear it but our beloved monarch, Tim- 
othy the Third. 

The Leading Democrat (very hastily) — Gh, I say, 
that is nice. So shiny and bright, and good service- 
able stuff, too. That would make a mighty good rain- 
coat. (Briskly) Say, now, Mr. Tailor, how would you 
like to form the Wonder Cloth Limited Company? 
You'd be president, of course, and hold thirty-three 
and one-third per cent of the stock, the same amount 
for the King, and the rest to be divided equally among 
my friends of the opposition here and myself. 

The Tailor — There will never be any more of the 
cloth. Only a little is left. Much has been lost. It 
lies in lonely places, in forests, at the bottom of the 



A Robe for the King 151 

sea, in city streets. I have searched the world for this 
cloth, and I have found no more than I could carry in 
this bag, a robe for the King {he holds his hand up), 
this square piece you see, and this long twisted piece 
that might be a rope. Yes, it might be a rope, for 
it is stronger than hemp. 

The Leading Democrat — That robe there, as near 
as I can judge, should be pretty much of a fit for his 
majesty. He might wear it for his regular afternoon 
walk through the city to-day. 

The King — Oh, I don't think I'll take my exercise 
to-day. There's rather a nasty bite to the air. 

The Leading Democrat — Don't forget, you're a 
constitutional monarch. 

The Tailor — If the King will wear my robe to-day 
I can go on with my journey to' find the cloth the world 
has lost. Already I have found a King who can see, 
and it only remains to discover whether there is vision 
in his people, too. 

The King {musing) — Hum! If the people can see 
it, hey? That's a bit of a risk now, isn't it? When I 
wear that robe of your magic cloth it might be a good 
idea to have something warm and substantial under- 
neath. It wouldn't do to have any mistakes, you know. 
After all, I don't want a lot of stupid louts thinking 
I'm parading around in my B. V. D.'s. 

The Leading Democrat — Does your majesty mean 
to suggest that the common people of Marma, from 



I $2 Seeing Things at Night 

whom he derives all his just powers, are not to be 
trusted? 

The King — You know I didn't mean that. Of 
course I trust the people. I realize perfectly well that 
they'd die for me and all that, but, after all, you can't 
be sure of everybody in a big crowd. There'll be fish- 
wives, you know, and Socialists and highwaymen and 
plumbers and reporters and everything. 

The Leading Democrat — It all gets down to this, 
your majesty: do you trust the people, or don't you? 

The King — I trust them as much as you do, but 
I don't go to excess. I don't see any good reason why 
I shouldn't wear an ordinary business suit under this 
magic royal robe. A King can't take chances, you 
know. He must play it safe. 

The Tailor — Don't say that, your majesty. You're 
a King, your majesty. Think of that. You mustn't 
tap in front of you, like a blind man with a stick. 
You mustn't fear to bump your head. If you hold it 
high, you know, there 'd be nothing to fear but the 
stars. 

The King — You are eloquent, O stranger from a 
far country, and what do you mean? 

The Tailor — Only this: if you wear my robe you 
must cast off compromise and expediency. 

The King — Oh, that's all right. I was only think- 
ing about trousers. 



A Robe for the King 153 

The Tailor — They were a compromise of Adam's, 
your majesty. 

The King — Quite true, but I hope you wouldn't 
go so far as to object to essentials. It's mesh stuff, 
you know, and very thin. Practically nothing at all. 
Just one piece. Somehow or other I don't believe I'd 
feel easy without it. Sort of a habit with me. 

The Tailor — If you wear my robe you must put 
aside every other garment. 

The King — But this is December. 

The Tailor — Your majesty, the man who wears this 
cloth will never fear cold. 

The Leading Democrat — It seems to me that the 
only question is, Does his majesty trust the people fully 
and completely? 

The King — Of course I trust the people. 

The Leading Democrat — Then why are you afraid 
to show yourself before them in this magnificent new 
robe? Is there any reason to believe that they who 
are the real rulers of Marma cannot see this cloth which 
the Tailor sees, which I see and admire so much and 
{pointedly) which your majesty, Timothy the Third, 
cannot conceivably fail to see? It would be unfortu- 
nate if it became a matter of news that your majesty 
did not believe in the capabilities and worthiness of 
the people. 

The King — Oh, I believe all right. 



r $4 Seeing Things at Night 

The Leading Democrat — Then why are you 
afraid? 

The King — Give me the robe. I am not afraid. 
(The Tailor stoops and seems to take something out 
of a bag. He extends the invisible object to the King, 
who clumsily pretends to hang it over his arm.) 

The Tailor — Oh, not that way, your majesty. It 
will wrinkle. (Painstakingly he smooths out a little 
air and returns it to the astonished monarch.) 

The King (to the Leading Republican, the Leading 
Democrat and the two Courtiers) — You will meet me 
at the great gate of the palace in three minutes and ac- 
company me on my promenade through the city. (Exit 
the King. The Leading Republican draws close to the 
first Courtier.) 

Leading Republican — Wonderful fabric that, was 
it not? 

First Courtier — Much the finest I have ever seen. 

Leading Republican — Now, what shade should you 
say it was? It's hard to tell shades in this light, isn't 
it? 

First Courtier — I had no trouble, sir. The robe 
is a bright scarlet. 

Leading Republican — Scarlet, eh? (He moves 
over close to the second Courtier.) 

Leading Republican — Wonderful fabric that we 
saw just now, wasn't it? 



A Robe for the King 155 

Second Courtier — It was like a lake under the 
moonlight. 

Leading Republican — Moonlight? 

Second Courtier — Yes, it was easy to see that it 
was a miraculous fabric. Man could never have 
achieved that silver green. 

Leading Republican — Yes, it was a mighty fine 
color. {Raising his voice.) I think we had better join 
his majesty now, gentlemen, and I believe we shall have 
an interesting promenade. Good-by until later, Mr. 
Tailor. 

All— Good-by, Mr. Tailor! 

{The Tailor moves to a great window at the back of 
the stage and opens it. He leans out. He bows low 
to some one who is passing by underneath. The rat- 
tle of wagons may be heard distinctly, and the rumble 
of cars, with occasionally the honk of an automobile 
horn. Suddenly there is a noise much louder and 
shriller than any of these. It is the voice of a child, 
and it cries: "He hasn't got anything onl" Voice 
after voice takes up the shout. Seemingly thousands 
of people are shouting, "He hasn't got anything on!" 
Finally the shouting loses all coherence; it is just a 
great, ugly, angry noise. A shot breaks the glass of 
the window just above the Tailor's head. Quickly he 
protects himself from further attack in that direction 
by swinging two iron shutters together and fastening 



156 Seeing Things at Night 

them. Then he locks the great door through which 
the King and the Courtiers have just passed.) 

The Tailor {in sorrow and anger) — More blind 
men. (He moves to his bag and, dipping his hands in, 
raises them again to fondle an invisible something. As 
he is so engaged a little door at the right opens and a 
meanly dressed girl of about eighteen enters.) 

The Tailor — Keep your distance. I won't be taken 
alive. Not until I can find some one to care for my 
cloth. 

The Girl from the Kitchen — Oh, please, don't 
hurt me, mister. I ju^t ran up here because there were 
soldiers down in the garden, and shooting and things. 

The Tailor — Who are you? 

The Girl from the Kitchen — I'm the sixth assist- 
ant helper of the cook. 

The Tailor— The sixth? 

The Girl from the Kitchen — Yes, I clean the 
butter plates. 

The Tailor — And that's all you do? Just clean 
butter plates? How terrible! 

The Girl from the Kitchen — But it isn't. The 
cook says I'm the best butter dish cleaner in the world. 
I like butter. I like to touch it. There's no color in 
the world so beautiful. It's like that bit of cloth you 
have in your hands. 

The Tailor — You see the cloth? 

The Girl from the Kitchen — Of course I see it. 



A Robe for the King 157 

Why, it's right there in your hands. And it's yellow 
like the butter. 

The Tailor — Or gold. {He reaches into the bag 
again.) And what's this? {He holds his right hand 
high above his head.) 

The Girl from the Kitchen — Why, it's a yellow 
rope. 

The Tailor — Yes, that's it, a rope. I'm going to 
g ; ve you the other piece of cloth now, and later the 
rope, too. You must guard it as carefully, as carefully 
as you would watch one of your butter dishes. Do 
you understand? 

The Girl — I wouldn't lose it. It's pretty. 

The Tailor — Yes, it's pretty and the world mustn't 
lose it. You will find that most people can't see. I 
know only two, you and I, but there must be others. 
That's your task now, finding people who can see the 
cloth and cleaning butter plates, of course. {There 
is a loud pounding on the great door and a shout of 
"Open, in the King's name!" The knocking increases 
in violence and the command is repeated. Then men 
begin to swing against the door with heavy bars and 
Hatchets.) 

The Tailor — Here {he makes a gesture toward the 
girl), take the cloth. Go quickly to the kitchen. Then 
come back in a moment and save the rope, too. 

The Girl from the Kitchen — But what do they 
want? 



158 Seeing Things at Night 

The Tailor — They want to kill me. 

The Girl from the Kitchen — They mustn't. 

The Tailor — They won't if you get out and leave 
me alone. Here, hurry. {He half pushes her out the 
little door. Then he returns to the bag and seems to 
pull out something. He looks to the ceiling and finds 
a hook fairly in the middle of it. He moves his hand 
upward as if tossing something, and goes through the 
motions of tying a knot around his neck. Then the 
Tailor takes a chair and moves it to the center of the 
room. He stands upon it. The violent assault upon 
the door begins with renewed vigor. Some of the axes 
bite through the wood. The Tailor steps off the chair 
and dangles in the air. He floats in space, like a man 
in a magic trick, but one or two in the audience, dra- 
matic critics, perhaps, or scullery maids, may see that 
round his neck and fastened to the hook in the ceiling is 
a yellow rope.) 

{Curtain.) 



Turning Thirty 

"Margaret Fuller's father was thirty-two when 
she was born," writes Katharine Anthony in her biog- 
raphy of the great feminist. "A self-made man, he 
had been obliged to postpone marriage and family life 
to a comparatively advanced age." 

The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. 
For years and years we had been going along buoyed 
up by the comments of readers who wrote in from 
time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young 
man. You will learn better as you grow older." And 
now we find that we have grown older. We have 
reached a comparatively advanced age, and the prob- 
lem of whether or not we have learned better is pres- 
ent and persistent. It can no longer be put off as 
something which will work out all right in time. 

"Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm 
going to sit down and write a novel, or the great 
American drama, or an epic poem." Then some day 
comes and the young man finds that his joints are 
stiff and he can't sit down. 

However, we are not quite prepared to admit that 
thirty- two is the deadline. It seemed old age to us for 
a long time. When we were reporting baseball the 

159 



160 Seeing Things at Night 

players used to call Roy Hartzell, over on third base, 
"the old man," because he was all of twenty-nine, and 
veterans of thirty were constantly dropping out be- 
cause of advancing age and the pressure of recruits 
of nineteen and twenty. Yes, thirty-two was a com- 
paratively advanced age at that time. But then we 
got on to plays and books, and Bernard Shaw was 
doing all the timely hitting in the pinches, and, to mix 
the metaphor, breaking loose and running the length 
of the field, putting a straight arm into the faces of all 
who would tackle him. De Morgan started to blaze 
at the age of fifty, and James Huneker was the keenest 
of all the critics to hail anything in any art which was 
new and hitherto unclassified. And he, too, wrote his 
first novel, Painted Veils, long after fifty. It was a 
novel which we did not like very much, but all its 
faults were those of youth. Some of it actually sopho- 
moric. It was more like the work of F. Scott Fitz- 
gerald than any living author. We felt that it was a 
first novel by a "promising" man, and thirty and 
twenty-nine and all those ages seemed to us mere ver- 
dant days in the hatchery. 

We remember a sweet girl reporter going to Major 
General Sibert, commander of the First Division in 
its early days in France, and asking: "General, don't 
you think this is a young man's war?" Sibert grinned 
behind his gray mustache, and said: "When I was in 
West Point I used to bear in mind that Napoleon won 



Turning Thirty 161 



some of his greatest victories while he was in his thir- 
ties, but now I find my attention turning more and more 
to the fact that Hindenburg is seventy-two and Joffre 
is seventy." 

Time, we know, is fleeting, but there is always a 
little more left for the man who can look senility and 
destruction and all that sort of business straight in the 
eye and remark calmly, "I'm too busy this afternoon; 
drop around to-morrow." Thirty-two isn't a compara- 
tively advanced age. Some day we are going to write 
that epic poem, and the novel, and the great American 
drama. 

Turning to The Art of Lawn Tennis, by William Til- 
den, 2nd, we find the comforting information that 
"William A. Larned won the singles at past forty. 
Men of sixty are seen daily on the clubs' courts of 
England and America enjoying their game as keenly 
as any boy. It is to this game, in great measure, that 
they owe the physical fitness which enables them to 
play at their advanced age." 

Yet after all this is not quite so comforting. We 
know one or two of these iron athletes who have out- 
lived their generation and they are among the bores 
of the world. After one of them has captured the third 
set by dashing to the net and volleying your shot off 
at a sharp angle he invariably rubs it in by asking you 
to guess how old you think he is. We always answer, 
"Ninety-six," but there is no discouraging him or stop- 



1 62 Seeing Things at Night 

ping him before he has gone on to tell you about break- 
ing the ice in the tub for his morning plunge. 

There is an unearthly air about these men whom 
God has forgotten. They are like those Prussian sol- 
diers of Frederick who continued to stand after swords 
and bullets had gone through them and required the 
services of some one to go about the field and push 
them over so that they might be decently buried. 
There were men like that in one of the lands which 
Gulliver visited. They never died and probably they 
played a sharp game of tennis and later in the club- 
house they were accustomed to sit around and say how 
much better the actors used to be fifty years ago. 
Everybody hated them and stayed away from their 
company in droves. 

No, we set no store of hope on being a sixty-year- 
old prodigy at lawn tennis. We dodder about the court 
already. We had just as soon be gray and bald and 
all the rest of it if only we can ever grow young enough 
to write a bold and slashing novel and be suppressed 
by Mr. Sumner. 



Margaret Fuller 

Katharine Anthony's Margaret Fuller is biogra- 
phy in new and fascinating form. "A psychological 
biography," Miss Anthony calls it, and she takes ad- 
vantage of the theories of Freud and Jung to reveal 
new facts about the life of a woman long dead, by the 
process of submitting well known material to the psy- 
choanalytic test. This is an engrossing game. There 
is something about it quite suggestive of the contrast 
between Sherlock Holmes and the more dull-witted de- 
tectives of Scotland Yard. Holmes, you remember, 
could come into a room after all the members of the 
force had pawed the evidence and interpret something 
new from the cigar ash on the table which had been 
to them just cigar ash, but was to Holmes convincing 
evidence that the crime had been committed by a red- 
haired man, six feet in height, born in Kentucky and 
an enrolled member of the Democratic Party. Other 
biographers were content to record the fact that Mar- 
garet Fuller was a nervous child who received all her 
early education at. home from her father. There they 
paused, and it is just here that Miss Anthony leaps 
in to explain the exact emotional relation between fa- 
ther and daughter which simmered about in Mar- 

163 



164 Seeing Things at Night 

garet's subconsciousness and contributed to the con- 
vulsions of her early schooldays. 

It is fascinating to watch the skilled biographer re- 
veal all sorts of facts about Margaret Fuller of which 
she herself had not the ghost of a notion. We can't 
say that the theory of the biographer is always con- 
vincing, although we must admit that her case is full 
and logical at every turn. To us it is just a little too 
logical. There is so much proof that we are rather in- 
clined to believe that the theory is not altogether so. 
It is only fair to admit that Margaret seems to have 
been a Freudian herself long before there was a Freud. 
Again and again her own observations, quick, intuitive 
leaps, coincide almost exactly with theories worked out 
later by much more difficult and rational processes. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, also, seems to have had some^ 
conception of the unconscious quite consistent with 
the most modern theorists, for he records a conversa- 
tion between himself and Margaret Fuller in which 
they talked about "the experiences of early childhood, 
whose influence remains upon the character after the 
recollection of them has passed away." 

Margaret Fuller, laboratory specimen, is an inter- 
esting study; Margaret Fuller, feminist, an inspiring 
figure in American history; but most of all our in- 
terest is captured by that portion of the book which 
deals with Margaret Fuller, literary critic of The New 
York Tribune. She wrote three critical articles a week, 



Margaret Fuller 165 

which appeared on the first page of the paper, and 
since her day newspaper reviewing has gone back in 
other respects than the mere process of burying itself 
more deeply within the paper. Opinions about books 
seem to have been more exciting and provocative in 
the days of Margaret Fuller and Horace Greeley. At 
any rate, one or the other wrote an article in The 
Tribune which inspired a libel suit by James Fenimore 
Cooper in which he won a verdict of $200. Nothing 
like that happens to-day. Once we managed to incite 
an actor into a lawsuit, but the only sign of recogni- 
tion which we ever obtain from belaboring an author is 
a telephone message or a letter saying that our adverse 
notice has amused him very much and greatly con- 
tributed to the sale of his little book and would we 
come around and have lunch. 

^ Miss Fuller managed to cut deeper. James Russell 
Lowell never recovered from the shock of her poor 
opinion of him, and was forever lampooning her in 
public life and private. She seems to have been sin- 
gularly free from awe for the great literary figures of 
her day. In an age when not liking Longfellow was 
almost as much a mark of national treason as urging 
a reduction in the German indemnity would be to-day 
Miss Fuller wrote of Longfellow in exactly the spirit 
in which he is regarded by the later critics who looked 
at him dispassionately. 

"When we see a person of moderate powers," she 



1 66 Seeing Things at Night 

wrote, "receive honors which should be reserved for 
the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and 
taking from him the crown which should be reserved 
for grander brows. And yet this is, perhaps, ungen- 
erous. ... He (Longfellow) has no style of his own, 
growing out of his experiences and observations of na- 
ture. Nature with him, whether human or external, 
is always seen through the windows of literature. . . . 
This want of the free breath of nature, this perpetual 
borrowing of imagery, this excessive, because superfi- 
cial, culture which he has derived from an acquaintance 
with the elegant literature of many nations and men, 
out of proportion to the experience of life within him- 
self, prevent Mr. Longfellow's verses from ever being 
a true refreshment to ourselves." 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was her close friend, and yet 
she could see him clearly enough from a critical point 
of view to write: "We doubt this friend raised himself 
too early to the perpendicular, and did not lie along 
the ground long enough to hear the whispers of our 
parent life. We would wish he might be thrown by 
conflicts on the lap of Mother Earth, to see if he 
would not rise again with added powers." 



The feminism of Margaret Fuller is passionate and 
far reaching. It does not stop merely with the plea 
for the vote, but includes a newer and freer ideal of 
marriage. There is inspiration in this, and yet some- 



Margaret Fuller 167 

thing a little disturbing in the article which she wrote 
about the London Reform Club, in which she said: "I 
was not sorry, however, to see men predominant in the 
cooking department, as I hope to see that and washing 
transferred to their care in the progress of things, since 
they are 'the stronger sex.' " 



Holding a Baby 

When Adam delved and Eve span, the fiction that 
man is incapable of housework was first established. It 
would be interesting to figure out just how many foot- 
pounds of energy men have saved themselves, since 
the creation of the world, by keeping up the pretense 
that a special knack is required for washing dishes and 
for dusting, and that the knack is wholly feminine. 
The pretense of incapacity is impudent in its audacity, 
and yet it works. 

Men build bridges and throw railroads across des- 
erts, and yet they contend successfully that the job 
of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, 
they don't have to sew buttons. 

It might be said, of course, that the safety of sus- 
pension bridges is so much more important than that 
of suspenders that the division of labor is only fair, 
but there are many of us who have never thrown a 
railroad in our lives, and yet swagger in all the glory 
of masculine achievement without undertaking any of 
the drudgery of odd jobs. 

Probably men alone could never have maintained the 
fallacy of masculine incapacity without the aid of 
women. As soon as that rather limited sphere, once 

168 



Holding a Baby 169 

known as woman's place, was established, women be- 
gan to glorify and exaggerate its importance, by the 
pretense that it was all so special and difficult that 
no other sex could possibly begin to accomplish the 
tasks entailed. To this declaration men gave imme- 
diate and eager assent and they have kept it up. The 
most casual examination will reveal the fact that all 
the jokes about the horrible results of masculine cook- 
ing and sewing are written by men. It is all part of 
a great scheme of sex propaganda. 

Naturally there are other factors. Biology has been 
unscrupulous enough to discriminate markedly against 
women, and men have seized upon this advantage to 
press the belief that, since the bearing of children is 
exclusively the province of women, it must be that 
all the caring for them belongs properly to the same 
sex. Yet how ridiculous this is. 

Most things which have to be done for children 
are of the simplest sort. They should tax the intelli- 
gence of no one. Men profess a total lack of ability to 
wash baby's face simply because they believe there's 
no great fun in the business, at either end of the sponge. 
Protectively, man must go the whole distance and pre- 
tend that there is not one single thing which he can 
do for baby. He must even maintain that he doesn't 
know how to hold one. From this pretense has grown 
the shockingly transparent fallacy that holding a baby 
correctly is one of the fine arts; or, perhaps even more 



170 Seeing Things at Night 

fearsome than that, a wonderful intuition, which has 
come down after centuries of effort to women only. 

"The thing that surprised Richard most," says a 
recent woman novelist, "was the ease and the efficiency 
with which Eleanor handled Annabel. . . . She seemed 
to know by instinct, things that Richard could not un- 
derstand and that he could not understand how she 
came by. If she reached out her hands to tak" An- 
nabel, her fingers seemed, of themselves, to curve into 
the places where they would fit the spineless bundle 
and give it support." 

At this point, interruption is inevitable. Places in- 
deed! There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly 
different ways of holding a baby — and all are right! 
At least all will do. There is no need of seeking out 
special places for the hands. A baby is so soft that 
anybody with a firm grip can make places for an 
effective hold wherever he chooses. But to return to 
our quotation : "If Richard tried to take up the bundle, 
his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab 
and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless. 
'How do you do it?' he would say. And he would right 
Annabel and try to still her protests. And Eleanor would 
only smile gently and send him on some masculine er- 
rand, while she soothed Annabel's feelings in the proper 
way." 

You may depend upon it that Richard also smiled 
as soon as he was safely out of the house and embarked 



Holding a Baby 171 

upon some masculine errand, such as playing eighteen 
holes of golf. Probably, by the time he reached the 
tenth green, he was too intent upon his game to re- 
member how guile had won him freedom. Otherwise, 
he would have laughed again, when he holed a twenty- 
foot putt over a rolling green and recollected that he 
had escaped an afternoon of carrying Annabel because 
he was too awkward. I once knew the wife of the 
greatest billiard player in the world, and she informed 
me with much pride that her husband was incapable 
of carrying the baby. "He doesn't seem to have the 
proper touch," she explained. 

As a matter of fact, even if men in general were as 
awkward as they pretend to be at home, there would 
still be small reason for their shirking the task of 
carrying a baby. Except that right side up is best, 
there is" not much to learn. As I ventured to suggest 
before, almost any firm grip will do. Of course the 
child may cry, but that is simoly because he has be- 
come over-particular through too much coddling. Na- 
ture herself is cavalir. Young rabbits don't even 
whimper when picked up by the ears, and kittens are 
quite contented to be lifted by the scruff of the neck. 

This same Nature has been used as the principal 
argument for woman's exclusive ability to take care of 
the young. It is pretty generally held that all a woman 
needs to do to know all about children is to have some. 
This wisdom is attributed to instinct. Again and again 



172 Seeing Things at Night 

we have been told by rapturous grandmothers that: 
"It isn't something which can be read in a book or 
taught in a school. Nature is the great teacher." 
This simply isn't true. There are many mothers in 
America who have learned far more from the manuals 
of Dr. Holt than instinct ever taught them — and Dr. 
Holt is a man, I have seen mothers give beer and 
spaghetti and Neapolitan ice-cream to children in arms, 
and, if they got that from instinct, the only conclusion 
possible is that instinct did not know what it was 
talking about. Instinct is not what it used to be. 

I have no feeling of being a traitor to my sex, when 
I say that I believe in at least a rough equality of par- 
enthood. In shirking all the business of caring for chil- 
dren we have escaped much hard labor. It has been 
convenient. Perhaps it has been too convenient. If 
we have avoided arduous tasks, we have also missed 
much fun of a very special kind. Like children in a 
toy shop, we have chosen to live with the most amusing 
of talking-and-walking dolls, without ever attempting 
to tear down the sign which says, "Do not touch.' 7 In 
fact we have helped to set it in place. That is a pity. 

Children mean nothing at long range. For our own 
sake we ought to throw off the pretense of incapacity 
and ask that we be given a half share in them. I hope 
that this can be done without its being necessary for 
us to share the responsibility of dishes also. I don't 
think there are any concealed joys in washing dishes. 



Holding a Baby 173 

Washing children is quite a different matter. After 
you have washed somebody else's face you feel that 
you know him better. This may be the reason why so 
many trained nurses marry their patients — but that is 
another story. A dish is an unresponsive thing. It 
gives back nothing. A child's face offers competitive 
possibilities. It is interesting to see just how high a 
polish can be achieved without making it cry. 

There is also a distinct sense of elation in doing 
trifling practical things for children. They are so 
small and so helpless that they contribute vastly to a 
comforting glow in the ego of the grown-up. When you 
have completed the rather difficult task of preparing 
a child for bed and actually getting him there, you 
have a sense of importance almost divine in its extent. 
This is to feel at one with Fate, to be the master of 
another's destiny, of his waking and his sleeping and 
his going out into the world. It is a brand-new world 
for the child. He is a veritable Adam and you loom 
up in his life as more than mortal. Golf is well enough 
for a Sunday sport, but it is a trifling thing beside the 
privilege of taking a small son to the zoo and letting 
him see his first lion, his first tiger and, best of all, his 
first elephant. Probably he will think that they are 
part of your own handiwork turned out for his pleas- 
ure. 

To a child, at least, even the meanest of us may seem 
glamourous with magic and wisdom. It seems a pity 



174 Seeing Things at Night 

not to take the fullest advantage of this chance before 
the opportunity is> lost. There must come a day when 
even the most nimble- witted father has to reply, "I 
don't know." On that day the child comes out of 
Eden and you are only a man again. Cortes on his 
lonely peak in Darien was a pigmy discoverer beside 
the child eating his first spoonful of ice-cream. There 
is the immediate frightened and angry rebellion against 
the coldness of it, and then the amazing sensation as 
the strange substance melts into magic of pleasant 
sweetness. The child will go on to high adventure, but 
I doubt whether the world holds for any one more soul- 
stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice- 
cream. No, there is nothing dull in feeding a child. 

There is less to be said for dressing a child, from 
the point of view of recreation. This seems to us la- 
borious and rather tiresome, both for father and child. 
Still I knew one man who managed to make an adven- 
ture of it. He boasted that he had broken all the 
records of the world for changing all or any part of 
a child's clothing. He was a skilled automobile me- 
chanic, much in demand in races, where tires are 
whisked on and off. He brought his technic into the 
home. I saw several of his demonstrations. He was 
a silent man who habitually carried a mouthful of 
safety pins. Once the required youngster had been 
pointed out, he wasted no time in preliminary whee- 
dlings but tossed her on the floor without more ado. 



Holding a Baby 175 

Even before her head had bumped, he would be hard 
at work. With him the thrill lay in the inspiration 
of the competitive spirit. He endeavored always to 
have his task completed before the child could begin 
to cry. He never lost. Often the child cried after- 
ward, but by that time my friend felt that his part 
of the job was completed — and would turn the you r " 
ster over to her mother. 



Red Magic 

Everybody said it was a great opportunity for Hans. 
The pay was small, to be sure, but the hours were 
short and the chance for advancement prodigious. 
Already the boy could take a pair of rabbits out of 
a high hat, or change a bunch of carrots into a bowl 
of goldfish. Unfortunately, the Dutchmen of Roth- 
dam were vegetarians, and Hans was not yet learned 
enough in magic to turn goldfish back to carrots. 
Many times he had asked his master, Kahnale, for 
instruction in the big tricks. He longed to go in for 
advanced magic, such as typhoons, volcanic eruptions 
and earthquakes. He even aspired to juggle planets 
and keep three stars in the air at once. 

Kahnale only smiled and spoke of the importance 
of rudiments. He pointed out that as long as inex- 
perience made mistakes possible it would be better to 
mar a carrot or two than the solar system. 

Not all the boy's projects were vast. It seemed as 
if there was as much enthusiasm in his voice when he 
asked about love philters as when he spoke of earth- 
quakes. His casual inquiry as to the formula for 
making a rival disappear into thin air betrayed an 
eagerness not present in his planetary researches. 

176 



Red Magic 177 



But to every question Kahnale replied, "Wait." The 
magician intimated that a bachelor of black arts might 
play pranks with the winds, the mountains and the 
stars forbidden to a freshman. True love, he declared, 
would be the merest trifle for one who knew all the 
lore. Hans found surprisingly small comfort in these 
promises. He had seen the sixteen foot shelf of magic 
in the back room where the skeletons swung in white 
arcs through the violet haze. Millions of words stood 
between him and Gretchen, and she was already seven- 
teen and he had turned twenty. It irked him that he 
should be forced to learn Arabic, Chaldean and a little 
Phoenician to win a Dutch girl. Sometimes he imag- 
ined she cared for him in spite of a seeming disdain 
and he hoped that he might win her without recourse 
to magic, but then she grew coy again. Anyway, 
Kahnale had told him that only post-graduate students 
should seek to read the heart of a woman. 

And so Hans polished the high hats, fed the rab- 
bits, read the prescribed pieces in Volume One and 
learned a little day by day. He yearned more. It 
seemed as if there must be a short cut to the knowledge 
which he wanted, and this belief was strengthened one 
day when he discovered a thin and ever so aged volume 
hidden behind the books of the sixteen foot shelf. Be- 
fore he had a chance to open the little book Kahnale 
rushed into the room and cried out to him in a great 
and terrible voice to drop the volume. Carefully, 



178 Seeing Things at Night 

the magician returned the book to its hiding place and 
he warned Hans never to touch it again upon the pain 
of the most extensive and prodigious penalties. He 
not only intimated that disobedience would be danger- 
ous to Hans, but to his family, to the town of Rothdam, 
to Holland and to the world. 

Six months passed and Hans had striven to remem- 
ber so many things since the day of the warning that 
he had all but forgotten the words of Kahnale. Lying 
atop the dyke, Hans gave the magician never a thought. 
The boy drew pictures in the loose sand with the toe 
of his sabot and brushed them away one after the 
other. At last he completed a design which struck his 
fancy and he ceased work to admire it. He had drawn 
a large heart and exactly in the center he had written 
"Gretchen." 

It may have been a charm or a coincidence, but he 
looked up from the sand design just in time to see 
her passing along the road which ran parallel to the 
dyke. He shouted after her, but it was a capricious 
day with Gretchen, and she went along about her busi- 
ness without once looking back, under the pretense 
that she had not heard the greeting. 

Hans raged and made as if to demolish the heart, and 
Gretchen, and indeed the whole dyke, but then he 
thought of something better. He got up and entering 
the house of Kahnale, went into the back room with- 
out even stopping to rattle the skeletons. The room 



Red Magic 179 



was empty and Hans rummaged behind the long row 
of magic books until he found the old volume which 
he felt sure would give him some of the needful secrets 
which had been withheld from him. Opening the book, 
he blew away a thick top soil of ancient dust and was 
chagrined to find that whatever knowledge lay before 
him was concealed in some language so ancient that he 
could not understand a single word. 

"Perhaps," he thought to himself, "this is a charm 
I can set to ticking even if I can't understand it." 
Fearing that Kahnale might come upon him, he hid 
the book under his coat and carried it out to his re- 
treat on top of the dyke. In a low voice he began to 
read the strange and fearsome sentences in the book. 
Although they meant nothing to him, they possessed a 
fine rolling cadence which captured his fancy, and mere 
boldly and more loudly Hans went on with his reading. 

While Hans meddled with the book of magic, 
Kahnale was in consultation with the Mayor of Roth- 
dam, who sought some charm or potion which would 
insure him reelection. He had been a thoroughly in- 
efficient Mayor, but the magician dealt with clients as 
impartially as a lawyer or doctor, and he agreed to 
weave the necessary spells. He stipulated only that 
the Mayor should accompany him to the house on the 
dyke, where there was a more propitious atmosphere 
for black art than in the town hall. After some little 
fuss and fume about the price and the long walk and 



180 Seeing Things at Night 

his dignity, the Mayor consented, and the two men 
descended the great stairway of the town hall. No 
Sooner had they reached the street than Kahnale looked 
at the sky in amazement. The day had been the most 
stolid and fair of days when he entered the Mayor's 
office, but now the western sky was filled with tier upon 
tier of angry black clouds, and as he looked there was 
a fearsome flash of fire broad as a canal and a roll of 
thunder which shook the ground beneath their feet. 

"Quick!" cried Kahnale, and seizing the Mayor by 
the arm he rushed him down the road which led to the 
sea. As they ran a rising wind with a salt tang smote 
their faces. The clouds were growing blacker and 
heavier. It almost seemed as if they might topple. 
There was another flash bright as the light which 
blinded Saul. The Mayor crossed himself and prayed. 
Kahnale cursed. They were within a hundred feet of 
the sea when a second flare of fire outlined a figure on 
the dyke. It swayed to and fro and moaned above the 
growing roar of the wind. 

In a sudden hush between the gusts the figure turned 
and they could hear the voice distinctly enough, though 
it seemed to be the voice of some one a long way off. 
"Eb dewollah," said the voice, and Kahnale clapped 
his hands to his head in horror. 

"It is the end," cried the wizard. "There is no hope. 
This is the final charm. The Lord's Prayer is last of 
all." 



Red Magic 181 



"I do not hear the Lord's Prayer. What is it?" 
pleaded the Mayor. 

"You would not understand," explained Kahnale. 
"The prayer is said backward, as in all charms. He 
has reached 'Eb Dewollah,' and that is 'Hallowed Be!' 
The prayer is the last of the charm." 

"Charm? What charm?" said the Mayor queru- 
lously, clinging close to Kahnale. 

"The master charm," said the magician. "This is 
the spell which when said aloud summons all the forces 
of the devil and brings the destruction of the world." 

"The world!" interrupted the Mayor in amazement. 
"Then Rothdam will be destroyed," and he began to 
weep. 

Kahnale paid no heed. "It can't be stopped," he 
muttered. "It must go on. He has the book and there 
is no power strong enough to stop the spell." 

"If I only had my policemen and my priest," moaned 
the Mayor. 

"Is that all?" said Kahnale. "I have enough magic 
for that." 

The magician spoke three words and made two 
passes in the air before he turned and pointed to 
Rothdam. Instantly the bell in the town hall which 
called all villagers to the dyke tolled wildly. The 
wind was rising and shrilling louder and louder, and 
the sky was now of midnight blackness. The Mayor 
looked up in wretched terror at the figure on the dyke 



(182 Seeing Things at Night 

and started to rush at him as if to pitch him into the 
sea. Kahnale held him back. "Wait," he said. "If 
you touched the devil servant you would die." 

Above the shriek of the wind rose the voice from 
the dyke. "Nevaeh ni," said the voice. "In heaven," 
muttered Kahnale. "It is almost done." 

Down the road in the teeth of the gale came the vil- 
lagers of Rothdam. In the van were the Mayor's po- 
lice in red coats. They carried clubs and blunder- 
busses, and one, more hurriedly summoned than his 
companions, held a poker. 

f< There," cried the Mayor, "shoot that man on the 
dyke!" And with the first flash of light the foremost 
guard ran halfway up the steep embankment and lev- 
eled his blunderbuss. He fired. The roar of the gun 
was answered by a crash of thunder. A fang of fire 
darted from the center of the clouds and the guard 
rolled down the dyke and lay still at the bottom. 

"Tra ohw," came the voice from the dyke. The 
priest, not daunted by the fate of the guard, hurried 
close to the side of the swaying figure and sprinkled 
him with holy water, but no sooner had the water left 
his hands than each drop changed to a tiny tongue of 
fire, leaping and dancing on the shoulder of the devil 
servant. The priest drew back in horror and the 
Mayor, with a cry of fear, threw himself at the foot 
of the dyke and turied his face in the long grasses. 
High above the booming of the gale and the crash of 



Red Magic 183 



the waves against the barrier came the voice from 
the dyke, "Rehtaf." 

"Father," said Kahnale, "I come, master devil!" he 
cried with one hand raised. 

The sea which had almost reached the top of the 
dyke suddenly receded. Back and back it went and 
bared a deep and slimy floor. On that floor were 
many unswept things of horror. The earth trembled. 
The black clouds were banks of floating flame. The 
villagers turned to run from the dyke, for now the sea 
was returning. It rushed toward the dyke in a wave 
a hundred feet high. 

Out of the crowd one ran forward and not back. 
It was a girl with flaxen hair and red ribbons. She 
ran straight to the figure on the dyke. 

"It's Gretchen," she called. "Save me, Hans, save 
me." She threw her arms around the boy's neck and 
kissed him. The wall of water hung on the edge of 
the dyke like a violin string drawn tight. Then it 
surged forward and swallowed up both boy and girl. 

Some folk in Rothdam say that Hans dropped the 
book of black magic and kissed Gretchen before the 
water swept over them, but the villagers are not sure 
about this trifle, since at that moment they were watch- 
ing the rebirth of a lost world. 

The wave of water a hundred feet high dwindled 
until it was no wave, but only a few tall grasses sway- 
ing gently in the dying land breeze. The clouds of 



184 Seeing Things at Night 

fire faded to mist, pink tinted by the setting sun. 
Somewhere about were roses. 

The villagers rushed to the top of the dyke. A po- 
liceman who had muddied his uniform as if by a fall 
rose to his feet and followed them, rubbing his head. 
Far below the dyke lay a calm sea. On the horizon 
were ships. 

"Rothdam and its brave citizens are saved," said 
the Mayor. "To-night I will burn two hundred can- 
dles in honor of our patron saint, who has this day 
delivered us and enabled us to continue a happy exist- 
ence under the best municipal government Rothdam 
has ever known." There were cheers. 

That night Kahnale walked on the dyke alone. 
Everybody else was in the cathedral. That is, every- 
body but one policeman, who pleaded a severe head- 
ache. The magician listened to the bells of the cathe- 
dral and then he shook his head. "It was not the saint 
who saved us," he muttered. "There are no miracles. 
Somewhere there is a rational magical explanation for 
all this." But he had to shake his head again. "It is 
not in the books," he muttered. 

Just then the moon came from behind a cloud and 
silvered some marks in the path of Kahnale. The ma- 
gician stooped and looked. There on the top of the 
wave swept dyke, drawn in the loose sand, was a large 
heart, and in the center of it was written "Gretchen." 



The Last Trump 

"Ours is an easy-going and optimistic age," writes 
John Roach Straton in one of his "messages and wrath 
and judgment, " which are combined in a volume called 
The Menace of Immorality. "We do not like to be dis- 
turbed with unpleasant thoughts," continues the genial 
doctor, "and yet, if we are wise men and women, we 
will give due consideration to these things, in the light 
of the tremendous times in which we live. There never 
has been such a day as this before in the world's his- 
tory. This is a time already of judgment upon a 
wicked world. The whole world is now standing in 
the shadow of anarchy and starvation. Unless we re- 
pent and turn to God, we will have to pay the price of 
our folly and sins. And New York, let us understand, 
is no exception to these great truths of God. Though 
she exalt herself to the very heavens, she shall be laid 
low, unless she repents and turns from faer wicked 
ways. We have become so vain to-day over scientific 
achievements and education and all that, that we have 
tended to condescend even to God. We tend to look 
down upon Him from our lordly human heights. But 
what folly it is! "He who sitteth in the heavens shall 
laugh! May He not laugh at us! And let us well 
know that God's arm is not shortened and that He has 

185 



1 86 Seeing Things at Night 

the means, even of temporal judgment, in His almighty 
hands. Have you ever thought of what a good, husky 
tidal wave would do to 'Little Old New York/ as we 
call her? Have you ever imagined the Wool worth sky- 
scraper butting headlong into the Equitable Building, 
through such an earthquake as that which laid San 
Francisco's proud beauty in the dust? Have you ever 
imagined the Metropolitan Tower crashing over on 
Madison Square Garden sometime, when there were 
tens of thousands of people in there at some worldly, 
godless celebration of the Lord's Day? Ah, yes, don't 
worry about God's not having the means for judgment, 
even in this world!" 

As a matter of fact, that is a subject concerning 
which we never have worried. There isn't a doubt in 
our mind that the earthquake, or the tidal wave or any 
of the other dooms so gleefully mentioned by Dr. 
Straton are well within the power of the Creator. Yet 
it seems to us that it would hardly be to the Creator's 
credit if he should turn a tidal wave upon New York 
because Dr. Straton has revealed the fact, that in some 
dance halls in New York, young men and women dance 
cheek to cheek. It is, of course, a terrible thing that 
there are still restaurants in New York where one may 
procure Scotch highballs, but we do not think the con- 
dition justifies an earthquake. It may be, as Dr. 
Straton says, that God will do one of these things and 
then laugh at us, but if such is the case we must say 



The Last Trump 187 

that we will not have much respect for the cosmic sense 
of humor. We want a God who is a good deal more 
like God and somewhat less like Dr. John Roach 
Straton. 

When a child grows cross and tired he will trample 
every card house you build for him and toss his toys 
about and knock over his blocks, but at such times 
H. 3rd has never seemed divine to us. We have 
rather laid such tantrums to the original Adam who is 
in us all. As a matter of fact, we don't believe that 
Dr. Straton himself would have as good a time at any 
of his predicted catastrophes as he imagines. To be 
sure, it is pleasant to imagine oneself sitting on top of 
a tidal wave and thumbing a nose at the struggling sin- 
ners who are being engulfed. • But has Dr. Straton ever 
stopped to consider what a dreary and dull life he 
would lead if there were nothing for him to thunder 
against? He must know by now what a delightful in- 
spiration there is in the daily shock. Though he may 
not believe it, he will do well to mark our words that 
he will miss the dancing and the immoral gowns and the 
furtive highballs when all these things are gone. He 
will find that there is a great deal more fun in preach- 
ing about hell than about heaven. 

We are not even sure that, in a thoroughgoing civic 
catastrophe, Dr. Straton would escape. When Sodom 
and Gomorrah fell Lot was allowed te escape. And 
so it may be with Dr. Straton. That is not the dan- 



1 88 Seeing Things at Night 

ger. We have a very definite foreboding that when 
he is well out of the doomed city and the destruction 
has begun, Dr. Straton will not be able to resist the 
temptation to look back even though he turn to salt. 
If we understand the man, he will not be able to depart 
without ascertaining whether his name has been men- 
tioned in the special five-star annihilation extras as hav- 
ing foretold the disaster. 



Spanking Manners 

We have received The Literary Digest Parents 9 
League Series, in which the training of children is 
discussed in seven volumes by William Byron Forbush. 
Much of it seems sound and shrewd, but it also seeks, 
by implication at any rate to encourage parents to 
maintain with their children the old nonsense of paren- 
tal infallibility. Thus, in one volume, which suggests 
the manner in which a father may impart certain in- 
formation to his son, he is quoted as saying, "I tell 
you this, Frank, because I know all about it." And 
in another volume mothers are urged to hold before 
their children the ideals of the Light Brigade, "Theirs 
not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." 

Now there is no denying that this is a comfortable 
doctrine for parents, if they can put it over, but they 
must make up their minds that sooner or later they 
will be found out. 

Also, we are in entire disagreement with the author 
when he says that spankings should be administered 
in a cool and deliberate manner, that "punishment must 
partake of the nature of a ceremony." The only ex- 
cuse for a parent who spanks his child is that he has 
lost his temper and his patience and his ability to think 

189 



190 Seeing Things at Night 

up any better remedy. If he is asked why he does it 
he would do well to explain all that very frankly to 
the child and to add that it is the rather harsh rule of 
the world that stronger people usually adopt force 
against weaker people to get what they want. The 
child may regard him as a bully, but he will not be 
in danger of being thought a hypocrite as well. 

This system seems far preferable to the one suggested 
by the author in a quotation from Charles Werner: 
"My boy, listen: I love you and I do not like to hurt 
you. But every boy must be made to obey his fa- 
ther and mother, and this seems to be the only way to 
make you do it. So remember! Every time you dis- 
obey me you shall be punished. When I tell you to 
do a thing, you must do it instantly without a mo- 
ment's delay. If you hesitate, if you wait to be told 
the second time, you will be punished. When I speak 
you must act. Just as sure as you are standing here 
before me this punishment will follow every time you 
do not do as you are told." 

This would be, at least, a commendably frank state- 
ment of the tyranny under which most children are 
held if it were not for the unjustified intrusion of the 
love motive. This occurs, however, in a still more ob- 
jectionable form in a reply to a mother, in which the 
author writes, ''Should it ever be necessary to spank 
him I should not refuse to kiss him, even while you 
are doing so. He can learn that no punishment is in- 



Spanking Manners 191 

flicted in anger and that punishment does not turn 
aside your affection." 

Such conduct is adding insult to indignity. It goes 
beyond the tyranny which few parents can resist in a 
state in which interests are necessarily so conflicting 
as one which is inhabited by growing persons and 
grown-ups. It is probably not to be expected, or even 
desirable, that parents should always allow the inter- 
ests of the child to displace their own, but when they 
cannot resist the temptation to sweep over the borders 
of childhood with all their armed forces it is a little 
too much to ask that the conquered people should be 
not only docile but grateful. In other words, the father 
or mother who says as a prelude to punishment, "I am 
doing this for your own good," is a liar at least nine 
times out of ten. What he means is, "I am doing this 
for my own convenience," and he ought to be frank 
enough to say so. 

The trouble is, as Mr. Floyd Dell has pointed out, 
that the parent wants complete submission and com- 
plete affection too. He can't have both without mak- 
ing a hypocrite of his child. It is perfectly healthy that 
the child should have fierce outbursts of resentment 
against his parents when they get in his way, and he 
should be allowed, and even encouraged, to express his 
protest. It is the most arrant nonsense to suppose 
that a relationship of continual love is a desirable thing 
to keep up. It is much too wearing. 



192 Seeing Things at Night 

The other day I tried to take a small fragment of 
newspaper out of H. 3rd's mouth, and he tried to 
swing his right to the jaw. I still have the reach, and 
I was able to protect myself by a frequent use of a 
lightning left jab. Finally I rescued the paper. It 
was only a small section of an editorial in an evening 
newspaper about the trial of the five Socialist Assem- 
blymen. Probably I might just as well have permitted 
H. 3rd to swallow it. Without doubt, the paper would 
have taken it back the next day, anyway. 

In speaking of his endeavor "to make the small du- 
ties of life pleasant to the chilci" one parent writes: 
"These items should never enter the arena of argu- 
ment; they may, if taken up early, by a gentle, loving 
firmness, be treated always as though they were as cer- 
tain as sunrise, for there is a curious conventionality, 
a liking for having things done in a dependable fashion, 
with little folks, and there is nothing to which human 
nature in young or old more cheerfully submits than 
the inevitable. " 

Yes, and there is a curious conventionality in the 
man who has been hopping about the office all day in 
obeying the orders of the junior partner or the city 
editor, which inspires him when he comes home to 
his children to pretend that he is Kaiser, Fate, or God 
Himself. 

"No time of day is more heavenly in a home than 



Spanking Manners 193 

the hour when little children, like white angels, go up 
the stairs to bed." 

We wonder if our continued failure to get any such 
impression rests only on the fact that we have no 
stairs. 

"One wise mother tells her children to divide all 
people into two classes — friends and strangers. 
Friends we love too well to gossip about; strangers 
we know too little. 

"Another suggests to her children to meet a proposal 
toward gossip with the quiet remark, 'I like all my 
friends.' Nothing more can be said." 

But it can; the child rebuked by the quiet remark 
has only to say, "Well, then, let's talk about Gaby 
Deslys or King Edward VII." 



Park Row and Fleet Street 

It is difficult for us to tell how accurately Philip 
Gibbs has pictured Fleet Street in his novel The Street 
of Adventure; for, externally at least, there is little 
resemblance to Park Row. We cite, for instance, a 
description of the city room of The Star as Francis Lut- 
trell found it on his first day: 

"It was a large room, with a number of desks di- 
vided by glass partitions and with a large table in the 
center. At the far end of the room was a fire burning 
brightly in the grate, and in front of it were two men 
and a girl, the men in swing chairs with their legs 
stretched out, the girl on the floor in the billows of a 
black silk skirt, arranging chestnuts on the first bar of 
the grate." 

There isn't any grate in our city room and we have 
no roasting parties. There have been days in mid- July 
when it might have been possible to fry eggs on the 
skylight of our city room, but we don't remember 
that anybody ever tried it. Nor is our memory stirred 
to any local reminiscences by the description of The 
Star office just before press time, when "silence 
reigned in the room except for the scratching of 
pens." Probably there are not more than half a 

194 



Park Row and Fleet Street 195 

dozen pens in all Park Row and four of them are 
on The Evening Post. 



We find the difference in spirit not so great. There 
is a great deal about the terrific strain of newspaper 
work and how a brutal city editor will drive a finely 
tempered reporter until he has had the best of his brains 
and then toss him aside like a withered violet. 

"Fleet Street/' says Gibbs, who tells the story partly 
in the first person ; "would kill you in a year — it is very 
cruel, very callous to the sufferings of men's souls and 
bodies." 

Again, the heroine, who is a press woman, complains: 
"We women wear out sooner. Five years in Fleet 
Street withers any girl. Then she gets crow's feet round 
her eyes and becomes snappy and fretful, or a fierce 
creature struggling in an unequal combat with men. 
I am just reaching that stage." 

An even more terrifying picture is painted of the 
book reviewer. He was, according to Gibbs, "A 
young, anemic-looking man with fair, wavy hair, going 
a little gray, and a pale, haggard, clean-shaven face, 
seated, with- his elbows on the desk, a novel opened 
before him and six other novels in a pile at his elbow. 
He was smoking a cigarette, and the third finger of 
his left hand was deeply stained with nicotine. As 
Luttrell entered he groaned slightly and pushed back a 
lock of his fair hair from his forehead." 



196 Seeing Things at Night 

We would like to find something personal in that 
portrait or at least to hope that we might be like that 
after a few years more of this terrific strain. But we 
doubt it. Despite eleven years of unremitting toil we 
have been unable to wear ourselves gray or conspicu- 
ously haggard or clean shaven. It is not easy. To be 
sure, we have heard many newspaper men picturing 
themselves as butterflies broken on the wheel, but al- 
ways with a melancholy gusto. Moreover, that was in 
the days when Jack's and Joel's were open all night. 

We can't speak with authority about Fleet Street, 
nor even pretend to be infallible about Park Row, but 
it is our impression that newspaper work is easier than 
any of the other professions except the ministry. And 
the easiest sort of newspaper work is dramatic criti- 
cism or book reviewing. If you are not sure of your 
facts you can just leave them out, and even if they 
get in wrong it doesn't matter much. There is a cer- 
tain amount of work to be done in the first two or three 
years, but by that time the critic should have a particu- 
lar pigeonhole in his brain for practically every book 
or play which comes along. Upon seeing "I'll Say It 
Is" in 1922 all he has to do is to remember what he 
said about "Have Another" in 1920. Once or twice 
a year a book or play comes along which doesn't fit 
into any pigeonhole, but that can be dismissed in one 
paragraph as "queer" and allowed to go at that. 



Merrick's Women 

The novels of Leonard Merrick go a long way in 
reconciling us to the constitutional establishment of the 
single standard of morals proposed by William Jen- 
nings Bryan. Merrick's world is a hard one for 
women. His men starve romantically in a pretty pov- 
erty. Their dingy haunts are of the gayest. Bad luck 
only adds to their merriment. So it is, too, with the 
Kikis and Mignons, but Merrick's good women are of 
much more fragile stuff. Although invariably English, 
they grow pale and woebegone just as easily in London 
as in Paris. The author never gives them any fun at 
all. A harsh word makes them tremble, but they fear 
kindness even more. When they are not starving they 
are fluttering confoundedly because somebody has 
spoken to them. 

With half of When Love Flies Out o' the Window be- 
hind us, we are entirely out of patience with Meenie 
Weston. There is no denying, of course, that Meenie 
had a hard time. Well-paid singing teachers told her 
that she possessed a great voice, but when her father 
died she found that the best she could do was an engage- 
ment in the.chorus, and not always that. 

After months without work she signed a contract 
to sing in what she supposed was a Parisian concert 

197 



198 Seeing Things at Night 

hall, but it turned out to be a dingy cabaret. Worse 
than that, Miss Weston found that between songs she 
was supposed to sit at a table and let chance patrons 
buy her food and drink. It was not much of a job 
and Miss Weston refused to mingle with the audience. 
Then one night the villainous proprietor locked her out 
of her dressing room and she was forced to venture 
down among the customers. 

Up to this point our sympathies were generally with 
the heroine, except at the point, back in London, where 
the author recorded, "Miss Joyce proposed that they 
should 'drink luck' to the undertaking and have c a 
glass of port wine.' The girl (our heroine) had been 
in the chorus too long to be startled by the sugges- 
tion—" 

It seemed to us that there was nothing particularly 
horrifying in the suggestion, even if it had been made 
to a young lady who had never been on the stage. 
Despite this clue to Miss Weston's character, we were 
disappointed and surprised at her conduct in the Paris 
cabaret. She sat first with her one friend in the es^ 
tablishment, who was a kindly but hardened cabaret 
singer. She did her best for Meenie, but she did not 
understand her. "That any girl could tremble at the 
idea of talking to strangers across a table and imbibing 
beer at their expense was beyond her comprehension." 

Our sympathy lay with the cabaret veteran rather 
than with Meenie. Of course, we did not expect Miss 



Merrick's Women 199 

Weston to enjoy her predicament, but when a man 
asked her, "Are you going to sing 'As Once in May' 
to-night?" we could not quite see why Mr. Merrick 
found it necessary to report the fact that: 

"She started, and the man told himself that he had 
really stumbled on a singular study. 

" 'Yes,' she faltered." 

To us it seemed a simple question simply put. After 
all, it was fortunate that the young man did not begin 
with "Will you have a drink?" Brutal and insulting 
language of that sort would certainly have sent Meenie 
straight into hysterics. Even when the young man 
dropped in the next night there seemed to be nothing 
in his conversation to alarm our heroine excessively, 
but Merrick is wedded to the notion that virtue in a 
woman is a sort of panic. A good name, he seems to 
believe, is something which a woman carries tightly 
clasped in both arms like a bowl of goldfish. To stum- 
ble would be almost as fatal as to fall. 

"I came to talk to you again, if you'll let me," said 
the young man. 

"You know very well that I can't help it," our 
heroine answered. This was not polite, but at least 
it had a more engaging quality of boldness than any- 
thing she had said before. But soon she was fluttering 
again. "Oh, you have only to say I'm a nuisance! I 
assure you that if you'd rather I left you alone I 
won't speak another word," continued the young man. 



200 Seeing Things at Night 

This seemed reassuring enough, but it has a devastat- 
ing effect upon our heroine, for we find that "Her 
mouth twitched, and she looked at the ground." 

Eventually she and the young man were married. 
He had spoken to her without an introduction, and 
he was enough of a gentleman to realize that he must 
right the wrong and make an honest woman of her. 

Although we have not yet finished the book, we 
rather suspect that they will not be very happy. Mer- 
rick's good women never are. They all suffer terrifi- 
cally just because they lack the ability to bulwark 
their virtue behind a couple of snappy comebacks, such 
as, "Where do you get that stuff?" or, "How do you get 
that way?" 



Just Around the Corner 

We sometimes wonder just how and what Joseph 
Conrad would have written if he had never gone to sea. 
It may be that he would never have written at all if 
he had not been urged on by the emotion which he felt 
about ships and seas and great winds. And yet we re- 
gret sometimes that he is so definitely sea-struck. 
After all, Conrad is a man so keen in his understanding 
of the human heart that he can reach deep places. It 
is sometimes a pity, therefore, that he is so much con- 
cerned with researches which take him down into noth- 
ing more than water, which, even at its mightiest, is 
no such infinite element as the mind of man. 

Typhoons and hurricanes make a brave show of 
noise and fury, but there is nothing in them but wind. 
No storm which Conrad ever pictured could be half so 
extraordinary as the tumult which went on in the soul 
of Lord Jim. We notice at this point that we have used 
heart and mind and soul without defining what we 
meant by any of them. We mean the same thing in 
each case, but for the life of us we don't know just what 
it is. Lord Jim, of course, is a great book, but to our 
mind the real battle is a bit obscured by the strange- 
ness and the vividness of the external adventures 
through which the hero passes. There is danger that 

201 



202 Seeing Things at Night 

the attention of the reader may be distracted by silent 
seas and savage tribes and jungles from the fact that 
Jim's fight was really fought just behind his forehead; 
that it was a fight which might have taken place in 
Trafalgar Square or Harlem or Emporia. 

Naturally, we have no right to imply that nothing 
of consequence can happen in wild and strange places. 
There is just as much romance on Chinese junks as 
on Jersey Central ferryboats. But no more. Here is 
the crux of our complaint. Conrad and Kipling and 
the rest have written so magnificently about the far 
places that we have come to think of them as the true 
home of romance. Indeed, we have almost been in- 
duced to believe that there is nothing adventurous west 
of Suez. Hereabouts, it seems as if one qualified as a 
true romancer simply from the fact of living in Shang- 
hai or Singapore, or just off the island of Carimata. 
And yet we suppose there are people in Shanghai who 
cobble shoes all day long and sleep at nights, and that 
there are dishes to be washed in Singapore. 

For our own part, we remember that we once spent 
ten days in Peking, and our liveliest recollection is that 
one night we held a ten high straight flush in hearts 
against two full houses. One of them was aces and 
kings. That was adventure, to be sure, and yet we 
have held a jack high straight flush in clubs against 
four sixes in no more distant realm than West Forty- 
fourth Street. 



Just Around the Corner 203 

Adventure is like that. It always seizes upon a per- 
son when he least expects it. There is no good chas- 
ing to the ends of the earth after romance. Not if you 
want the true romance. It moves faster than tramp 
steamers or pirate schooners. We hold that there is 
no validity in the belief that a little salt will assist the 
capture; no, not even when it is mixed with spume, or 
green waves, or purple seas. Only this year we saw 
a play about a youngster who pined away to death be- 
cause he neglected to accept an opportunity to sail 
around the world. He wanted adventure. He starved 
for romance. He felt sure that it was in Penang and 
not in the fields of his father's farm. It was not reason- 
able for him thus to break his heart. If Romance had 
marked him for her own the hills of Vermont would 
have been no more a barrier to her coming than the 
tops of the Andes. 



Reform Through Reading 

Virtue, good health, efficiency and all the other sub- 
jects which are served up in the numberless thick vol- 
umes with a purpose seldom seem desirable when the 
propagandist has finished his say about them. For 
instance, we began the day with a firm determination 
never to smoke again — that is, not for some time — and 
then we ran across Efficiency Through Concentration, 
by B. Johnston. Since then we light the new cigarette 
from the dying embers of the old. The passage which 
enraged us most occurs in a chapter called "Personal 
Habits," in which the author writes: 

"If you are a gentleman always ask a lady's permis- 
sion before smoking, and if you find that her state- 
ment that it is disagreeable to her is a disappointment 
to you, and that your observance of her wishes causes 
you real discomfort, then you may know that the time 
has come to give up the habit entirely." 

To be sure, Mr. Johnston does not specify whether 
"the habit" refers to smoking or to the lady, but later 
it is made clear that he seriously suggests that a smoker 
should change his whole mode of life to suit the whim 
of "a lady" who is not otherwise identified in the book. 
What this particular "lady" is to the "gentleman" we 
don't know, but it sounds very much like blackmail. 

204 



Reform Through Reading 205 

Nor later were we much moved to strength of will 
against nicotine by the author's advice, "If self- 
conquest seems difficult, brace yourself up with the 
reminder that as heir of the ages you sum up in your- 
self all the powers of self-restraint bequeathed by your 
innumerable ancestors." 

To us that makes but slight appeal. After all, the 
ancestors most celebrated for self-restraint were those 
that didn't have any descendants. 

Later we came across "Concentrate your thought on 
the blessings that accompany moderation in all things." 
This, however, seemed to us an excellent suggestion 
if followed in moderation. 

Next we turned to a health book by Thomas R. 
Gaines which promised "a sound and certain way to 
health, a cure for fatigue, a preventive for disease and 
one of the most potent allies in the battle of life against 
premature old age." The book is called V italic Breath- 
ing and the introductory notice went on to say that 
the system suggested was easy to practise and cost 
nothing. Only when we came to facts did the new 
guide to health fail us, for then we read, "Vitalic 
breathing means inhaling in sniffs and forcibly exhal- 
ing." No dramatic critic could afford to follow such 
a system. He would be hurled out of every theater in 
town on the suspicion that he was hissing the show. 

Vance Thompson's advice in Live and Be Young is 
no easier. "The best is none too good for you," he 



206 Seeing Things at Night 

writes graciously, and continues: "Whether it is the 
country or the village or the city, the men and women 
you want to know are the best — those who are get- 
ting the best out of life — those who have beautiful 
homes and social influence — those who play games and 
make an art of pleasant things — in a word, those who 
are smart." 

We read on and learned that, "Rich people are, nine 
times out of ten, pleasanter, kindlier, better bred and 
less selfish than poor folk — they can afford to be; and 
they are more enjoyable playmates and steadier 
friends." 

No, after mature deliberation we think we would 
rather try the sniffing and forcibly exhaling method. 
We would even prefer to concentrate and give up to- 
bacco. Addition never was one of our strong points, 
and Mr. Thompson's advice is not for us. We would 
have a terrible time in finding out whether they really 
were rich enough to be of any use to our arteries. 
Clues are simple enough. It is easy to ask non- 
chalantly, "How much income tax did you pay this 
year?" But after obtaining that you have to find out 
whether your potentially rich man is living with his 
wife and whether he has any children or bad debts or 
Liberty bonds of that issue which is tax exempt. Then 
you must calculate the first few thousands on the basis 
of four per cent and on up. It couldn't be done in 
your head, and we doubt whether it would be polite to 



Reform Through Reading 207 

ask your host for paper and pencil. The system is 
all well enough after you have your rich, smart people 
identified, but the possibility of contracting premature 
old age while still in the research period seems to us 
too dangerous to meddle with. 

After setting down all this we find that we have not 
been fair to Mr. Thompson. Early in the book, on a 
page which we had inadvertently skipped, an easy 
method is suggested for ascertaining whether your 
friends are actually rich and smart. Speaking of such 
words as "climbers'' and "snobs" Mr. Thompson 
writes: "These epithets are always ready to the hand 
of the slack-living, uncouth man, who is more com- 
fortable in bad society than he is in good society — and 
he loves to throw them about. You know that man? 
He stands out in the commonnness and indecency of 
the street, as you go up to knock at the door of a smart 
house, and shouts, 'Snob!'" 

Of course, we would like it fine, but truthfulness com- 
pels us to admit that we never met him. Whether we 
like it or not we will have to continue to seek health 
in good works and deep breathing. 

Still, our own house is pretty smart. It carries three 
mortgages and has never dropped one yet. 



Shush! 

Gordon Craig's new book is called The Theatre 
Advancing, but we rather hope that when it reaches 
his goal line we will be elsewhere. To our mind the 
theater is the place where Art should beam upon the 
multitude and cry loudly, "Find out what everybody 
will have and don't forget the boys in the back room." 
Mr. Craig's theater is much too special for our taste. 
It will do away with everything that is boisterous and 
vulgar and broadly human. Consider, for instance, 
Mr. Craig's short chapter entitled "A Note on Ap- 
plause" set down in the form of a dialogue between the 
Reader and the Writer: 

"In the Moscow Art Theatre applause plays a very 
minor role. In general no play can live without it. In 
Moscow no actor takes a call before the curtain; hence, 
there is no applause." 

"Reader: Isn't that very dull?" 

"Writer: You think so; Moscow doesn't. It is all a 
matter of the point of view. When the acting is poor, 
an enthusiastic, roaring and thundering audience is 
necessary to keep up the spirits: but when the acting 
is absorbing applause is not needed, and if the actor 
won't come and bow, or the curtain rise after it has 
once fallen — well, then, applause becomes futile." 

20S 



Shush! 209 



"Reader: Whoever heard of such an idea?" 

"Writer: My dear Reader, it is not an idea, it is 
an established fact. Remove the reason for applause 
and you prevent the applause itself, and in doing so, 
prevent a vulgarity." 

"Reader: But it is the natural desire to want to ap- 
plaud when you see something good." 

"Writer: Rather it is an unnatural habit. You do 
not applaud a thing, only a man or a woman. Ap- 
plause is the flattery of the strong by the weak. 

"If the conductor and musicians of an orchestra were 
not seen we should never applaud music. We do not 
applaud architecture, painting, sculpture, or literature. 
W r e should not applaud hidden musicians." 

Concerning the last statement we have reason to 
doubt the accuracy of Mr. Craig's surmise in so far 
as it refers to American audiences. Every movie fan 
has heard audiences at some time or another break into 
wild applause for the shadows on the screen, and we 
were even more forcibly reminded of the strength of 
the personal illusion, no matter how inanimate the 
symbol, during the world's series. The players on the 
scoreboard which we watched were no more than 
wooden disks with "Collins," "Jackson," Cicotte" and 
the other names written upon them. When the Dutch 
Ruether disk was suddenly moved from the plate 
around to third base to indicate a triple, there were 
wild cheers from the crowd and they began to howl for 



2io Seeing Things at Night 

a change in pitchers. "Take him out!" they cried, 
appealing to a manager who did not even have so much 
as a disk to represent him. There was some more 
mad scurrying around the bases by the red disks, and 
then suddenly a large hand, symbolizing Fate or God 
or Kid Gleason, we don't know which, was thrust 
through a hole in the scoreboard and fastened upon 
the little round Cicotte to bear him away from his 
fling of reality back into his accustomed wooden private 
life. 

We don't know how it went with the Cicotte who 
left the diamond in Cincinnati. Not very well, we 
suppose. But for the wooden disk in Times Square 
it was a moment of triumph. For a fleeting second he 
was a man and the direct object of popular scorn and 
hatred. The rooter behind me shook his fist at him. 
"You got what was coming to you, you big stiff!" he 
shouted. 

Everybody looked around, and the man seemed a 
little shamefaced at his exhibition of hostility to a 
wooden disk. He felt that he owed the crowd an ex- 
planation and he came through handsomely. "He was 
shining up the ball with emery," he said. 

"We do not applaud the Atlantic Ocean," continues 
Craig, "or the poems of the ocean, but, catching sight 
of the man who can swim furthest in that ocean, we 
utter birdlike and beastlike cries." 

And yet we rather think that there have been times 



Shush! 211 



when men cheered for the sea. After that first silent 
moment on the peak in Darien, Cortez and his men 
must have been a pretty dull lot if they did not give 
at least one "Rah, rah, rah— P-A-C-I-F-I-C— Pa- 
cific !" 

Mr. Craig can't convince us that we applaud too 
much, for it is our impression that we don't get up 
to shout half often enough. We shout for Ty Cobb, 
to be sure, or for Eddie Casey if he gets loose, but as 
a rule we do no more than clap hands once or twice if 
Bernard Shaw bowls over all the interference and runs 
the whole length of the field without a tackier so much 
as throwing him off his stride. We shout when Jack 
Dempsey knocks Jess Willard down seven times in one 
round, but we don't do nearly as well for the writing 
man who gets after some big, hulking idea that has out- 
lived its usefulness and is still posing around as the 
hope of the white race. 

Somebody ought to issue a call for volunteer groups 
of serious shouters to go out and whoop it up for a 
skyscraper, or a sunset or a sonnet. None of us cuts 
much of a figure complaining about all the things in 
the world he doesn't like if he hasn't made a practice 
of yelling his head off for such few things as meet with 
his approval in the theater or out of it. More than 
that, Mr. Craig ought to remember that if there were 
no applause in the American theater there would be no 
curtain speeches by David Belasco. 



A Test for Critics 

Just when everything seems to be moving more or 
less smoothly somebody comes along and raises the 
entrance requirements for dramatic critics. Clayton 
Hamilton is the latest to suggest a new standard. His 
test for reviewers consists of three point-blank ques- 
tions, as follows: 

One — Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave 
of Amiens? 

Two — Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by 
moonlight? 

Three — Have you ever walked with whispers into 
the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini? 

Our grade on the test is thirty-three and one-third 
per cent, which is not generally regarded as a pass 
mark. 

We have stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens. 
We felt more bareheaded than usual because a German 
aeroplane was dropping bombs somewhere about the 
town. And yet even in this part of the examination 
we can hardly claim a perfect average. Come to think 
of it, we didn't exactly stand there in the nave at 
Amiens. We had heard of the increased difficulty of 
hitting a moving target, and whenever a bomb went 
off we found ourselves shifting rapidly from one foot 

212 



A Test for Critics 213 

to another. We were not minded that any German in 
the sky should look through the roof and mistake 
us for an ammunition dump. 

As for the rest, our failure is complete. We know 
that the Acropolis is a building in Athens or there- 
abouts. We have never seen it in moonlight or sun- 
light. We are not even sure that we would climb up. 
Our resolve would be largely influenced by the number 
of steps. Clayton Hamilton does not mention that. 
His is essentially the critical rather than the reportorial 
mind. We, for instance, are less interested in the fact 
that Clayton Hamilton climbed up by moonlight than 
in the time as caught by an accurate stop watch and 
the resulting respiration. We think that the Frari 
Madonna of Bellini is a picture, and Venice is our 
guess as to its home. Venice or Florence is always the 
best guess for Madonnas. 

The only solution we can think of is to ask the 
managers to shift our seats for the present from the 
fourth row of the orchestra to the second balcony. Of 
course, our fighting blood is up. We are determined 
to qualify as soon as possible. Some day we will climb 
that Acropolis roped together with Louis De Foe, 
Charles Darnton and Burns Mantle. There will be a 
little trepidation in the ascent, to be sure. One false 
step, one blunder, would be fatal, and we have known 
the other members of the party to make these blunders. 
But we will reach the top at last and stand wonder- 



214 Seeing Things at Night 

ingly in the moonlight, slowly recovering our breath, 
Mr. Darnton will undoubtedly be the first to speak. 
He will look at the ghostly architecture silvered in the 
moonlight, and then he will murmur "Big hit!" 

Later we will see the Frari Madonna, but it seems 
a little dangerous to predict that all the members of 
the party will walk with whispers. Perhaps that is 
not vital. At any rate, when the journey is completed 
we purpose to go straight from the dock to the office 
of A. H. Woods. If he consents to see us we are going 
to address him in this fashion: 

"Mr. Woods, we wish to make an apology to you. 
Some months ago we reviewed several of your shows, 
in spite of the fact that we had never climbed to the 
Acropolis in moonlight or walked with hushed whis- 
pers into the presence of the Frari Madonna of Bel- 
lini. Now that has been remedied. We have come 
back with a new vision. We are prepared to review 
the performances of your productions all over again. 
Do you think you could fix us up for to-morrow night 
with a couple of good aisle seats for Up in Mabel's 
Room?" 



Gray Gods and Green Goddesses 

A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or 
maybe it is a sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. 
Death seems certain. And if there is a heroine, some- 
thing worse than death awaits her — that is, from the 
Indians. Sawmills draw no sex distinctions. At any 
rate, things look very black for hero and heroine, but 
curiously enough, even at the darkest moment, I have 
never been able to get a bet down on the outcome. 
Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just 
in time,, on foot, or horseback, or even through the 
air. The worst of it is that everybody, except the hero 
and the heroine and the villain, knows that the unex- 
pected is certain to happen. It is not a betting propo- 
sition and yet it remains one of the most thrilling of 
all theatrical plots. William Archer proves in The 
Green Goddess that he is what Broadway calls a show- 
man, as well as being the most famous technician of 
his day. He has taken the oldest plot in the world and 
developed it into the most exciting melodrama of the 
season. 

Curiously enough, Mr. Archer has said that when he 
first thought of the idea for The Green Goddess he 
wanted to induce Shaw to collaborate with him on the 
play. It would have been an interesting combination. 
Shaw might have fooled everybody by following the 

215 



2l6 Seeing Things at Night 

probabilities and killing the heroine and hero coldly 
and completely. 

Mr. Archer, however, as the author of Play Making, 
knows that it is wrong to fool an audience, and so 
he kills only one of the beleaguered party, which is 
hardly a misfortune, since it enables the heroine, after 
a decent period of mourning, to marry the man she 
loves. As the Scriptures have it, joy cometh in the 
mourning. 

Archer probably did not set out to show just how 
much better he could do with a thriller than Theodore 
Kremer or Owen Davis. His scheme was broader than 
that. Satire was in his mind as well as melodrama. 
He began his play with much deft foolery at the ex- 
pense of the imperially minded English, by making 
his villainous rajah far more wise in life and literature 
than his English captives. When the rajah asks the 
brave English captain which play of Shaw he prefers, 
the gallant officer replies acidly: "I never read a line 
of the fellow." At this point in the play Mr. Archer 
and Mr. Arliss between them have succeeded in mak- 
ing the rajah such an altogether attractive person that 
a majority of the people in the audience are eager 
to have him obtain his revenge and quite reconciled to 
the heroine's accepting his marked attentions and be- 
coming the chief wife in the royal harem of Rukh. 

But melodrama is stronger stuff than satire. In the 
beginning, the playwright was melodramatic with an 



Gray Gods and Green Goddesses ZVJ 

amused sort of tolerance, but then the sheer excitement 
and rush of action seized him by the coattails and 
dragged him along helter-skelter. Satire was forgot- 
ten and the hero and heroine, confronted by death, 
began to speak with the round and eloquent mouth, as 
folk in danger always do in plays. The rajah became 
more villainous scene by scene and the little group of 
English captives braver and braver. They even devel- 
oped a trace of intelligence. 

None of this is cited as cause for grave complaint 
against William Archer. Greater men than he have 
tried to play with melodrama and have been bitten 
by it. Shakespeare began Hamlet as a searching and 
serious study of the soul of man, but before he was 
done the characters were fighting duels all over the 
place and going mad and participating in all the varied 
experiences which come to men in melodrama. After 
all, George Arliss succeeds in holding the rajah up as 
an admirable and interesting person, despite all the 
circumstances of the plot, which are leagued against 
him, and the author has been kind enough to permit 
him a cynical and cutting line at the end, even though 
he is deprived of the privilege of slaying his captives. 

But for the fact that the hero and heroine are res- 
cued by aeroplanes rather than a troop of cavalry or a 
camel corps, it can hardly be said that there is any 
new twist or turn in The Green Goddess. The surpris- 
ing and undoubted success of the play reveals the fact 



218 Seeing Things at Night 

that the so-called popular dramatists and the theorists 
are not so many miles apart as one might believe at first 
thought. When Mr. Archer brings in the relief party 
of aviators just, at the crucial moment, as hero and 
heroine are about to be slain, he has peripety in mind. 
But Theodore Kremer, who very possibly never heard 
of peripety, would do exactly the same thing. In other 
words, the technician is the man who invents or pre- 
serves labels to be pasted on the intuitive practices of 
his art. 

The Green Goddess is sound and shipshape in struc- 
ture, for all the fact that it is hardly a searching study 
of any form of life save that found within the theater. 
It is doubly welcome, not only as a rousing melodrama 
but, also, as an apt and pertinent reply to the question 
so frequently voiced by actors and playwrights: "Why 
doesn't one of these critics that's always talking about 
how plays should be written sit down and do one him- 
self?" 

If Archer is a little overcautious in taking human 
life in The Green Goddess, the law of averages still 
prevails, for Eugene O'Neill has made up the deficit in 
Different by rounding off his little play with a double 
hanging. This tragedy, described on the hoardings as 
a a daring study of a sex-starved woman," has much of 
O'Neill's characteristic skill in stage idiom, but it is 
much less convincing than the same author's The Em- 
peror Jones. Indeed Different is essentially a reflec- 



Gray Gods and Green Goddesses 2 if 

tion of the other play, in which O'Neill states again in 
other terms his theory that man is invariably over- 
thrown by the very factor in life which he seeks to es- 
cape. Emma of Difi'rent, like the Emperor Jones, 
completes a great circle in her frantic efforts to escape 
and, after refusing a young man, because of a single 
fall from grace, comes thirty years after to be an eager 
and unhappy spinster who throws herself at the head 
of a young rascal. With the growth of realism in the 
drama, criticism has become increasingly difficult, since 
the playwright's apt answer to disbelief on the part of 
the critics is to give dates, names, addresses and tele- 
phone numbers. "Let the captious be sure they know 
their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how 
she would act," says O'Neill menacingly to all who 
would question the profound truth of his "daring study 
of a sex-starved woman." Of course, the question is 
just how well does O'Neill know his Emmas, but this 
is to take dramatic criticism into a realm too personal 
for comfort. 

Seemingly, O'Neill and the other daring students of 
sex-starvation are well informed. Into the mind of 
the woman of forty-five they enter as easily as if it 
were guarded by nothing more than swinging doors. 
Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as a lodge 
room, for not all may enter, but only those who know 
the ritual. This is annoying to the uninitiated, but 
we can only bide our time and our protest until some 



22# Seeing Things at Night 

one of the young men takes the next step and gives us 
a complete and inside story of the psychology of ma- 
ternity. 

It might be possible to make a stand against the as- 
surance of some of the younger realists by saying that 
truth does not lie merely in the fact of being. Every 
day the most palpable falsehoods are seeking the dig- 
nity of truth by the simple expedient of occurring. Na- 
ture can be among the most fearsome of liars. Still 
the fundamental flaw of the younger realists does not 
lie here so much as in the fact that, as far as art goes, 
truth depends entirely on interpretation rather than 
existence. No man can set down a story fact for fact 
with the utmost fidelity and then step back and say: 
"This is a work of art because it is true." Art lies in 
the expression of his reaction to the facts. O'Neill's 
method in Different is quite the reverse of the artistic. 
He is, for the moment, merely a scientist. Pity, com- 
passion and all kindred emotions are rigorously ex- 
cluded. Rather, he says: "What is all this to me?" 
There is no spark of fire in neutrality. The artist must 
care. Though a creator, he is one of the smaller Gods 
to whom there is no sanction for a lofty gesture of 
finality with the last pat upon the clay. He cannot 
say, "Let there be light," and then take a Sabbath. 
His place is at the switchboard. In his world he is cre- 
ator, property man and prompter, too. The show can 
go on only most imperfectly without him. 



The Cosmic "Kid" 

Every little while some critic or other begins to 
dance about with all the excitement of a lonely watcher 
on a peak in Darien and to shout, as he dances, that 
Charlie Chaplin is a great actor. The grass on that 
peak is now crushed under foot. Harvey O'Higgins 
has danced there and Mrs. Fiske and many another, 
but still the critics rush in. Of course, a critic is al- 
most invariably gifted with the ability not to see or 
hear what any other commentator but himself writes 
about anything, but there is more than this to account 
for the fact that so many persons undertake to discover 
Chaplin. As in the case of all great artists, he is able 
to convey the impression, always, of doing a thing not 
only for the first time but of giving a special and pri- 
vate performance for each sensitive soul in the audi- 
ence. It is possible to sit in the middle of a large 
and tumultuous crowd and still feel that Charlie is 
doing special little things for your own benefit which 
nobody else in the house can understand or enjoy. 

Personally we never see him in a new picture with- 
out suddenly being struck with the thought, "How long 
has this been going on?" Each time we leave the the- 
ater we expect to see people dancing in the streets 
because of Chaplin and to meet delegations with olive 

221 



222 Seeing Things at Night 

wreaths hurrying toward Los Angeles. We don't. Un- 
fortunately Americans have a perfect passion for flying 
into a great state of calm about things and, for all the 
organized cheering from the top of the peak in Darien, 
we take Chaplin much too calmly at all moments ex- 
cept when we are watching him. Phrases which are 
his by every right have been wasted on lesser people. 
Walter Pater, for instance, lived before his time and 
was obliged to spend that fine observation, "Here is 
the head upon which all the ends of the earth have 
come and the eyelids are a little weary" upon the Mona 
Lisa. 

The same ends of the same earth have come upon 
the head of Charlie Chaplin. Still Mr. Pater, if he had 
lived, would have been obliged to amend his observa- 
tion a little. The eyelids are not weary. Unlike the 
Mona Lisa, Chaplin is able to shake his head every now 
and then and break free from his burden. In these 
great moments he seems to stand clear of all things 
and to be alone in space with nothing but sky about 
him. To be sure the earth crashes down on him again, 
but he bears it without blinking. It is only his shoul- 
ders which sag a little. 

Charlie seems to us to fulfil the demand made of the 
creative artist that he shall be both an individual and a 
symbol at the same time. He presents a definite per- 
sonality and yet he is also Man who grins and whistles 
as he clings to his spinning earth because he is afraid 



The Cosmic "Kid" 223 

to go home in the dark. To be much more explicit, 
there is one particular scene in The Kid in which Chap- 
lin having recently picked up a stray baby finds the 
greatest difficulty in getting rid of it. Balked at every 
turn, he sits down wearily upon a curbstone and sud- 
denly notices that just in front of him there is an open 
manhole. First he peers down; then he looks at the 
child. He hesitates and turns a project over in his 
mind and reluctantly decides that it won't do. Every 
father in the world has sat at some time or other by 
that manhole. Moreover, in the half suggested shake 
of his head Chaplin touches the paternal feeling more 
closely than any play ever written around a third act 
in a nursery on Christmas Eve. We can all watch 
him and choke down half a sob at the thought that 
after all the Life Force is supreme and you can't 
throw 'em down the manholes. 

Many a good performance on the stage is purely ac- 
cidental. Actors are praised for some trick of gesture 
or a particular note in the voice of which they are quite 
unconscious. We raved once over the remarkable fidel- 
ity of accent in an actress cast to play the role of a 
shop girl in a certain melodrama and it was not until 
we saw her the next season, when she was cast as a 
duchess, that we realized that there was no art about 
it. Chaplin does not play by ear. His method is defi- 
nite, and it could not seem so easy if it were not care- 
fully calculated. He does more with a gesture than 



224 Seeing Things at Night 

almost anybody else can do by falling downstairs. He 
can turn from one mood to another with all the agility 
of a polo pony. And in addition to being one of the 
greatest artists of our day he is more fun than all the 
rest put together. 

There must be a specially warm corner in Hell re- 
served for those parents who won't let their children 
see Charlie Chaplin on the ground that he is too vul- 
gar. Of course, he is vulgar. Everybody who amounts 
to anything has to touch earth now and again to be re- 
vitalized. Chaplin has the right attitude toward vul- 
garity. He can take it or let it alone. Children who 
don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed 
of much of their childhood. However, they can make 
it up in later years when the old Chaplin films will be 
on view in the museums and carefully studied under 
the direction of learned professors in university ex- 
tension courses. 



A Jung Man's Fancy 

Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and 
went to Heaven. It is just as well. The strain had 
become a little wearing. We had Liberty Loan orators, 
too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came 
to be something like being a permanent member of a 
cheering section. All that is gone now. Pointing with 
pride has become rude. The interpretation of life has 
been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick 
up any new novel at random and the chances are that 
it will begin about as follows: 

"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town 
stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mis- 
sissippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a mis- 
erable place in which to be born. With the exception 
of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the 
land for ten miles back of the town — called in derision 
by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing' — was almost entirely 
worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow 
and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, 
gaunt men, who seemed as exhausted and no-account 
as the land on which they lived." 

On page four the reader will find that young Hugh 
has been apprenticed to work on the sewers and after 
that, as the writer warms to his task, things begin to 

225 



226 Seeing Things at Night 

grow less cheerful. This particular exhibit happens to 
be taken from Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, but if 
we go north to Gopher Prairie, celebrated by Sinclair 
Lewis in Main Street, we shall find: "A fly-buzzing 
saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign 
across the front. Other saloons down the block. From 
them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing 
pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs — vice gone 
feeble and unenterprising and dull — the delicacy of a 
mining camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, 
farm wives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for 
their husbands to become drunk and ready to start 
home." 

Wander as you will through the novels of the year, 
I assure you that things will be found to be about the 
same. Of course, it is possible now and again to get 
away from the stale beer, but once a story enters prohi- 
bition time the study of starved souls and complexes 
begins. There are also books in which there isn't any 
mud, but these pay particular attention to the stifling 
dust. 

It must be that all this sort of life has been going on 
for some time, but naturally during the war when the 
Hun was at the gate it would hardly have been patriotic 
to talk about it. Now that it's all among friends we 
can talk about our morals and habits and they seem to 
range from none to appalling. I can't testify com- 
pletely to the state of affairs reported upon by the 



A Jung Man's Fancy 227 

novelists, because I have spent a good deal of time re- 
cently in the theater and it is only fair to say that 
there, at any rate, peach jam and country air still com- 
bine to reform city dwellers, and people get married 
and live happily ever after, and some of them dance 
and sing and make jokes, and, of course, sunlight and 
moonlight and pink dresses and green ones and gold 
and silver ones, too, abound. My aunt says that this 
is just as it should be. "There's so much unhappiness 
in the world," she says, "that why should we pay money 
to see shows and read books that help to remind us 
about it. The man worth while," she says, "is the man 
who can smile when everything goes dead wrong." 

Practically all the shows in town seem to have been 
written to please my aunt, but I don't agree with her 
at all. As a matter of fact, she lives in Pelham and 
has never heard of Freud or Jung. I tried to convince 
her once that practically all of what we call the civi- 
lized world is inhibited, and she interrupted to say that 
the last Saturday night lecturer told them the same 
thing about Mars. Perhaps it will be just as well to 
leave my aunt out of the story at this point and go on 
to explain why the modern novel is more stimulating 
and encouraging to the ego than the modern play. 

First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel 
or a play or any form of art is what we call an escape. 
To be sure, a good many plays of the year are not cal- 
culated to give anybody much of a start on the blood- 



228 Seeing Things at Night 

hounds, but you understand what I mean. Take, for 
instance, the most humdrum person of your acquaint- 
ance and you will probably find that he is an inveterate 
patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in 
real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in 
the moonlight and seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over 
gates. He himself will never be in the moonlight to any 
serious extent and he will jump no gates. The moving 
pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic crav- 
ings. 

The man in the theater or the man who reads a book 
identifies himself with one of the characters, hero or 
villain as the case may be, and while the spell is on he 
lives the life of the fictional character. Next morning 
he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An in- 
teresting thesis might be written on the question of just 
what bearing the eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon 
the falling marriage rate in the United States, but that 
would require a great many statistics and a knowledge 
of cube root. 

Assuming then that art, — and for the purposes of 
this argument moving pictures and crook plays will be 
included under that heading, — takes the place of life 
for a great many people, what do we find about the 
pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the 
community in general? Simply that the man who is 
addicted to seeing plays and reading books in which 
everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even go- 



A Jung Man's Fancy 229 

ing to the trouble of doing so much as one good deed 
a day on his own account. 

The man who went with me to see Daddies a couple 
of seasons ago glowed with as complete a spirit of self- 
sacrifice as I have ever seen during all three acts of the 
play. He projected himself into the story and felt that 
he was actually patting little children on the head and 
adopting orphans and surprising them with Christmas 
gifts. On the way uptown he let me pay the fares and 
buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly impulses 
had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very 
cross and gloomy for the rest of the week. 

Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my 
friend, I failed to make any complete identification 
with anybody on the stage, but I was also somewhat de- 
pressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of 
"the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me re- 
flect on the imperfections of life. It did not seem to 
me at the time as if any of the children who live in the 
flat next door ever really tinkle. A week later I saw 
Hamlet and the effect was diametrically opposite. 
Everything in the play tended to make life seem more 
cheerful. He was too, too solid in flesh, also, and in 
many other respects he seemed ever so much worse off 
than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs 
in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. 
And, goody, goody! next week an Ibsen season begins! 

It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is gen- 



230 Seeing Things at Night 

erally gloomy. Ibsen understood the psychology of his 
countrymen. He lived in a land of long cold winters 
and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and 
lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Nor- 
wegians would have gone home to die or to wish to die. 
Instead he gave them folk like Oswald, and all the 
Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the 
moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as 
much as from cold. After seeing Ghosts there is no 
place like home. I wish some of the Broadway dram- 
atists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have 
plays in which nobody could raise the mortgage and the 
rent crisis in our own lives would seem less acute. 

If the heroine were turned out into a driving snow- 
storm and stayed there, I might appreciate our janitor. 
And if the wild young men and the women who pay and 
pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act 
and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of 
degradation, I know I could derive no little satisfac- 
tion from the knowledge that the elevator in our build- 
ing runs until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights. 



Deburau 

Theatergoers who have lived through two or more 
generations invariably complain that the stage isn't 
what it used to be. Mostly they mourn for a school of 
drama in which emotion flowered more luxuriantly than 
in the usual run of plays to-day about life in country 
stores and city flats. The one thought in which these 
playgoers of another day take comfort is that even if 
we had such drama now there would be no one who 
could act it. But Deburau is such a play, and Lionel 
Atwill must be some such one as those who figure in 
the speeches of our older friends when they say: "Ah, 
but then you never saw — ". Sacha Guitry, who wrote 
Deburau, is alive; yes, indeed, even more than that, 
for he lives in Paris, and Lionel Atwill is a young actor 
whose greatest previous success in New York was 
achieved in the realistic drama of Ibsen. Now, it is 
possible for us to turn upon the elders and to say to 
them: "It is not for want of ability that this age of 
ours doesn't do your old-style plays. We could if we 
would. Go and see Deburau and Lionel Atwill." 

Of course, even in this verse play of the tragic life 
of a French actor of the early nineteenth century there 
are modern touches. For all the fact that Atwill is able 

231 * . 



232 Seeing Things at Night 

to rise now and again to a carefully contrived situa- 
tion and to develop it into a magnificent moment of 
ringing voice and sweeping gesture, he is also able to do 
the much greater and more exciting thing of making 
Deburau seem at times a man and not a great character 
in a play. He is able to make Deburau, actor, dead 
man, Frenchman, seem the common fellow of us all. 
And, still more wonderful, Lionel Atwill succeeds in 
doing this even in scenes during which the author is 
pitching rimed couplets around his neck as if he were 
no man at all, but nothing more than one of the posts 
in a game of quoits. I find it difficult to believe that 
anybody's heart is breaking when he expresses his emo- 
tion in carefully carpentered rhyme: 

"Trained in art from my cradle /' did you say? 

Well, I hadn't a cradle. But, anyway, 

If you bid me recall those things, here goes — 

Though I've tried hard enough to forget them, God knows. 

When people on the stage begin to speak in this 
fashion the persuasive air of reality is seldom present. 
It is with Atwill. He is careful not to accentuate the 
beat. Sometimes I am almost persuaded during his 
performance that it isn't poetry at all. When I watch 
him, verse is forgotten, but I have only to close my 
eyes to hear the deep and steady rumble of the beat 
which thumps beneath the play. Atwill is a man stand- 



Deburau 233 



ing on top of a volcano. So great is his unconcern that 
you may accept it as extinct, but sooner or later you 
will know better, for by and by, with a terrifying roar, 
off goes the head of the mountain in an eruption of 
rhyme. 

Atwill is not the only modern note in an old-fash- 
ioned play by a young man of to-day. Our forefathers 
may be speaking the truth when they tell us that in 
their day all the actors were nine or ten feet tall and 
spoke in voices slightly suggestive of Caruso at his best, 
but our forefathers never saw such a production as 
David Belasco has given to Deburau. No one knew 
in those days of the wonders which could be achieved 
with light. Nobody, then, could have shown us in the 
twinkling of an eye the front of Deburau's tiny theater, 
then the interior of the theater itself, and finally, with 
only a passing moment of darkness, carry the stage of 
the theater within a theater forward and set it down in 
front of the audience, greatly grown by its journey. 

In Sacha Guitry's play about Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard 
Deburau we see this famous clown and pantomimist, 
who brought all Paris to his tiny theater some hundred 
years ago, in the midst of a performance. We hear 
the applause of his audience and then after a bit we see 
the man himself rid of his Pierrot garb and his white 
grease paint. He is introduced to us as an exceedingly 
modest young genius who deplores the fact that he has 
become hated by his fellow players because of the ap- 



234 Seeing Things at Night 

plause heaped upon him by the critics. Nor is he any 
better pleased when fair ladies wait to see him after a 
performance to press their attentions upon him. For 
them he has invented a formula of repulse. After a 
moment or so he produces a miniature from his pocket 
and remarks: "Pretty, isn't it?" When the fair lady 
agrees he adds: "It's a picture of my wife. I should 
so like to have you meet her." 

But one night Deburau meets a lady much fairer 
than any of the others, and this time he forgets to show 
her the miniature. In the second act we find that he 
is madly in love with her, while she, although she is 
touched by his devotion, has outgrown her fancy for 
the actor. It is Deburau who christens her "the lady 
with the camellias," for she is Marie Duplessis, better 
known to us as Camille. Returning home for the first 
time in a week, Deburau finds his wife has left him 
and, gathering up his bird, his dog, and his little son, 
he goes to the house of Marie, hoping there to find 
welcome and consolation. Instead he finds another 
lover, Armand Duval, who is to make Marie one of the 
great heroines of emotional drama. 

Seven years pass before the next act begins, and now 
we find Deburau old, broken, and disheartened. He 
has left the theater and he lives tended only by his son, 
who has grown to be a lively youngster of seventeen. 
Somewhat to his chagrin, he finds that the boy is eager 
to become an actor, and this emotion changes to anger 



Deburau 235 



when he learns that his son has studied all his roles and 
hopes to make a debut in Paris simply as Deburau. 
He is not to be brushed aside in such cavalier fashion. 
There is only one Deburau, he declares, and there will 
be only one until he dies. 

To the garret, then, comes Marie Duplessis, truant 
through all the seven years, but the joy of Deburau is 
short-lived. He finds that she has not come back be- 
cause she loves him, but because she is sorry for him. 
She has come with her doctor. Still, after Marie has 
gone and Deburau has been left alone with the physi- 
cian, he finds unexpected consolation for his weary 
spirit. The physician finds no physical ailment. The 
trouble, he declares, is a nervous one. For that he can 
do little. Some magic other than medicine is needed. 
He suggests books, painting, nature, but to each De- 
burau shakes a weary head. They don't interest him. 
The theater, the doctor continues, is perhaps the best 
hospital of all. There are one or two actors, he tells 
Deburau, who are greater than any doctors in their 
power to bring merriment and new life to tired men. 

"Who?" asks the sick man, and the doctor tells him 
of Deburau and his great art. Yes, by all means De- 
burau is the man he should see. 

No sooner has the doctor left than Deburau calls 
for his hat and his stick. He will no longer sit idle 
while inferior men play his parts. He is going back to 
the theater. There we find him in the last act in the 



236 Seeing Things at Night 

middle of a performance in one of his most famous 
roles, but his old grace and agility are gone. When the 
audience should weep it laughs and there are tears 
instead of smiles for his decrepit attempts at comedy. 
Finally, he is hissed and booed and, after he has made 
a dumb speech of farewell, the curtain is rung down. 
The manager is in a panic. Somebody else must be 
put forward. It is quite evident that Deburau is done. 
In the crisis the old actor begs a favor. His son, he 
tells the manager, knows all his roles. Why not let 
the audience have a new Deburau, a young Deburau? 
Then, as the company gathers about to listen, the old 
man makes up the boy for his part, and as he does so 
he tells him in a few simple words the secrets and the 
fundamentals of the art of acting. Presently the drum 
of the barker is heard outside the theater and the 
audience hears him announce that Deburau the great 
will give way to a greater Deburau, a Deburau more 
agile, more comic, more tragic. Then the terrified boy 
is pushed out upon the stage and the play begins. 

By an ingenious device of David Belasco all our at- 
tention is focused upon the old man, who is listening 
and watching the performance of his successor, which 
we see only dimly through gauze curtains, but we hear 
the laughter and the shouts and the cheers. The new 
Deburau is a success, a triumph. The noise comes 
more faintly to our ears and we see only the old De- 
burau standing listening as from the house which has 



Deburau 237 



just hissed him there comes a wild acclaiming shout 
for his successor of "Deburau! Deburau!" 

The old man does not know whether he should laugh 
or cry, and so he cries. 



A Reviewer's Notebook 

There is an amazing simplicity about great events. 
Creation week was clear, calm and quiet. Hardly a 
ripple was on the Rubicon the afternoon that Caesar 
crossed. Even Babylon fell softly and bounced only 
once. In the same spirit Pierre V. R. Key started 
John McCormack: His Own Life Story. 

"It was a summer's day, with the sun shining," 
writes Mr. Key, "when we began. McCormack sat 
on the veranda of Rocklea, his Noroton, Connecticut, 
villa, gazing out upon the waters of Long Island Sound. 
He had sat that way for some minutes, in a suit of 
tennis flannels, his stalwart body relaxed in an arm- 
chair. I waited for his opening words. 'What a debt 
a man owes to his mother and father,' he said." 



Mr. Key's admiration for McCormack we found 
later on rests on unassailable grounds. "He began to 
sing," Key writes, "he sings to-day — and will go on 
singing until he dies — for just one reason alone: God 
meant that he should sing." 

We trust it will not be considered an impiety if we 
express a curiosity as to whether the nasal quality 
was included in God's intention. 

238 



A Reviewer's Notebook 239 

We have forgotten what Aristotle or Clayton Hamil- 
ton or any of the others have set down as the first rule 
for playwrights, but it seems to us that it ought to be: 
Get O. P. Heggie. It makes no difference what the 
part may be, court dandy, early Christian or conjuror, 
Heggie is your man. The only disturbing factor is that 
into every role this actor brings a sort of spiritual ani- 
mation. If you chance to call upon him to fall down 
stairs he will do it splendidly, missing not a single 
bump, and the audience will laugh its bellyful, but it 
will also have the feeling that in some curious way 
the thing has become exalted, that after all it may be 
the heart instead of the gizzard which is breaking un- 
der the emotion of the moment. Giving sawdust to 
this man is dangerous business, for the first thing you 
know he has changed it into blood. 

Heggie was by all odds the outstanding figure in Ian 
Hay's pleasant farce-comedy, Happy-Go-Lucky. He 
was cast as Samuel Stillbottle, a bailiff's man, made 
up like Fields, the tramp juggler, and called upon to 
perform all the antics dear to low comedy. He did 
them with gusto, but there was something more. 
Heggie is almost the only actor we know who can trip 
over a door sill and keep his performance in two di- 
mensions. The playwright may spread him into as 
broad a character as you please, but he cannot flatten 
him. Depth remains. When Heggie sets all the dishes 
to crashing or guzzles stage whisky till he chokes we 



240 Seeing Things at Night 

laugh first and then pause to wonder whether or not 
the soul of man is immortal. 

All this should be a part of the best clowning. The 
great clown is for us all the symbol of man's defiance 
to the great spaces and the wide darkness. Perhaps 
we die to-morrow, but to-day we are fellows of infinite 
jest. No matter what happens, we have laughed. To 
see O. P. Heggie is to be reminded of all the clowns 
that have ever been and are to come in the eternal 
succession of the brave and brazen. 



Nothing in the world dies quite as completely as an 
actor and the greater the actor the more terrifying be- 
comes the sudden transition from radiance to darkness. 
One day he is there with all his moods and complexi- 
ties and curious glints of this and that, and the next 
day there is nothing left but a few wigs and costumes; 
perhaps a volume of memoirs, and a scrapbook of clip- 
pings in which we learn that the dead player was "ma- 
jestic in presence" that "the poise of his head was stag- 
like" that he had "a great voice which boomed like a 
bell," that he was "regal, subtle, pathetic," and that 
"every one who was ever associated with him loved and 
respected him." 

Ask some veteran theatergoer "What was Booth like 
as Hamlet?" and he will say "Oh, he was wonderful." 
Perhaps the face of the old theatergoer will grow ani- 
mated and Booth may live again for a moment in his 



A Reviewer's Notebook 24.I1 

mind, but we who have never seen Booth will never 
know anything about him. Nobody can recreate and 
explain the art of a dead actor to the next generation. 
Even men who do tricks and true magic with words 
are not adept enough to set down any lasting portrait 
of an actor on the wing. 



A good deal of whitewash has flowed past the fence, 
but Tom Sawyer's trick still holds good. Even to-day 
it is possible to get hard work done by making people 
think of it as a privilege. In looking over an autumn 
catalogue, we came across a series of books for young 
persons in which we were struck by the titles, When 
Mother Lets Us Help and When Mother Lets Us Cook. 
We trust that the series will be extended along these 
lines. If so, we intend to use as birthday gifts for H. 
3rd, When Father Lets Me Stoke the Furnace, When 
Father Lets Me Shine His Shoes, and When Father 
Lets Me Lend Him Money. 



A great number of persons for whose opinions we 
have the highest respect have assured us that Woman, 
by Magdeleine Marx, is an absorbing and well-written 
novel. We have done our best but we can't go through. 
At the last attempt, under whip and spur, we reached 
page 46 and there we found, "A gentle pearl-gray 
breeze was stirring the curtains." We can go no fur- 



242 Seeing Things at Night 

ther. There is nothing for us to do but lie down and 
wait for the St. Bernards. 



We rushed in blithely the other day to talk to a 
woman's club up New York State on how to bring up 
children. Quoting from W. H. Hudson, we said firmly 
that they should never be spanked or even chided very 
much. "Let them run about and shift for themselves," 
we said airily. "The instinct of the child is often more 
sound than that of the grown-up. He is closer to old 
race instincts and memories than his parent." Then 
we finished up with our mule story and asked for ques- 
tions. 

We expected that somebody would ask whether Ethel 
Barrymore was a good actress, and did we like the 
novels of H.G.Wells, or one or two other easy questions 
like that, to which a lecturer need say nothing more 
than "yes" or "no" or "assuredly." Instead of that 
somebody said, "How many children have you brought 
up?" 

We could only answer that there was one, and that 
he wasn't very far up yet, nor had we been trusted 
with complete charge of him. At that point objections 
and questions became general and exceedingly difficult. 
Probably we gave some ground. There was, as we re- 
member it, the admission that there were times in 
which a spanking might seem a very tempting solution 
of a difficult problem, although we did qualify it by 



A Reviewer's Notebook 243 

urging that no moral interpretation be introduced into 
the punishment. We once knew a mother who used 
to say, "Gladys, you have been a bad girl, and so to- 
morrow at half -past eleven I'm going to spank you." 
That pose of cool and calm deliberation, of even-handed 
justice, of godlike inflexibility, has always seemed to 
us unbecoming in a parent. If he spanks a child he 
ought to be frank enough to say that he does it because 
he is angry and can't think up anything better. 

However, it is probable that we were too much flus- 
tered to develop our position at any great length. We 
felt uncomfortably as if we had agreed to talk to a G. 
A. R. Post on the Battle of Gettysburg. One mother 
told us that she had raised four children with frequent 
spankings and that one was now a college professor 
while the other three were exceedingly successful in 
the wholesale hardware business. She said she had 
never regretted it. All four had grown up God-fearing 
and dutiful. 

A still more devastating revelation of experience in 
child raising was yet to plague our confidence and 
complacency. "I'm an old woman," said one hearer, 
as we started to retire in none too good order, "and I 
can talk to you frankly. I have a daughter now who 
is old enough to have children of her own. I brought 
her up on that go-as-you-please system you have been 
talking about, and do you know what has become of 
her?" 



244 Seeing Things at Night 

We blanched a little and wondered just how frank 
she was going to be before we said "No." 

"She calls herself a Socialist/' said the old lady, and 
our lines broke away into full retreat at all points. 



Some of the political friends insist dolefully, a few 
gleefully, that if certain candidates, laws, economic 
schemes, or what not, fail of speedy adoption we shall 
have a revolution. We are even told that the scenes 
of the French Revolution will be enacted here. We 
don't believe it for a moment. At any rate, not if 
Dickens painted a true picture in A Tale of Two 
Cities because none of the radical ladies of our ac- 
quaintance could possibly perform the required knit- 
ting. 



"For no man can be free," writes the author of The 
Book of Marjorie, "unless he despises pain and heat 
and cold and fatigue, unless those things mean no more 
to him than the patter of rain outside his room, unless 
he does succeed in keeping them so outside himself 
that they never enter at all into the calculations of the 
thinking part of him. If we can bring up our child 
like this he will have nothing to fear, because he will 
know that no real hurt can be done to him except by 
himself." And in another portion of the book we read, 
"I should hate for my son to be afraid, because there 



A Reviewer s Notebook 245 

are so many things that hinder him and check him 
that he must take into consideration." 

But we are not at all sure that fear is to be set aside 
as one of the destructive emotions of mankind. All our 
fearless ancestors were eaten by ichthyosauri and other 
ferocious and primitive monsters. Indeed, there would 
be more ichthyosauri than men in the world to-day if 
certain of our progenitors had not learned that it is an 
exceedingly healthful thing at times to run for dear 
life. Of course, we admit that some fears are ignoble. 
We shall make no attempt, for instance, to justify our 
abiding distrust of cows, but the fact remains that a 
little decent fear is part of the proper portion of man. 

Man is a weak and pitiful dweller in a violent world 
and nothing has done so much to sharpen his wits as 
fear. Probably he found fire because he feared the 
dark. Surely he instituted law through distrust of his 
fellows. And fear must have been the first prompting 
toward religion. Then, too, it seems more than likely 
that there would never have been a literature but for 
fear. Primitive peoples liked to hear the stones of 
great heroes who did mighty deeds because such things 
served to cheer and inspirit them. 

Fear of his own frailties made man seek wisdom. 
To wish a child to grow up without fear is almost to 
wish him to be devoid of imagination. And more than 
that, if there was no such thing as fear courage would 
be without meaning and significance. 



246 Seeing Things at Night 

And yet we could wish that H. 3rd was not so 
frankly terrified at the sight of Ajax, who is not more 
than three months old or a foot long. Of course, 
Ajax attempts to bay, but it doesn't sound like much 
in a soprano. When the thin and piping voice of the 
dog sounds in agonized protest at being shut in the 
kitchen H. 3rd will throw both hands over his face 
and hide his head, as i( he were Uncle Tom with a 
whole pack of bloodhounds on his trail. Moreover, he 
showed such abject fear when taken out to have his 
hair cut that we had to desist and let him keep his curls. 
Still a little such trepidation on the part of Samson 
might have been set down as a virtue. 



Not the least interesting part of William Byron 
Forbush's seven volumes in The Literary Digest Par- 
ents' League Series is the section devoted to questions 
and answers. 

"I have a child," writes Esther P., "who already 
seems to be cut out for a business man. He refuses 
to play with dolls, balls, or even soldiers. This seems 
to restrict the range of toys for him. What can I pro- 
vide?" 

And Mr. Forbush answers : "There is an inexpensive 
'toytown bank.' Also an outfit of tickets and uniform 
with which to play ticket-agent. Encourage him to 
print paper money and checks and buy him some toy 
money. . . ." 



A Reviewer's Notebook 247 

If he is to be a real business man he'll not have any- 
thing to do with tickets bought directly at the box of- 
fice. It would be better we think to get him a bright 
vest and a derby hat and let him pretend to be a side- 
walk speculator. He might be encouraged to demand 
one pin a day from each of his parents for admission 
to the nursery and two pins, of course, on Saturdays 
and holidays. Also, arrangements could be made with 
some reliable brokerage house to have him supplied 
with the ticker tape each day. 



We like John Galsworthy a great deal better than 
we ever did before after reading his Addresses in 
America y 1919, for it seems to us that this man of 
lofty wisdom shows in this book a certain human tend- 
ency to fall into poppycock occasionally, like all the 
rest of us. In urging a closer comradeship between 
the English-speaking nations Mr. Galsworthy writes: 
"For unless we work together, and in no selfish or ex- 
clusive spirit — Goodby to Civilization! It will vanish 
like dew off the grass. The betterment not only of 
the British nations and America, but of all mankind, 
is and must be our object." 

We suppose the dewdrops in each particular meadow 
get together occasionally and tell each other that when 
they are gone there will be no more dew. But then 
there comes another morning. We are not anxious to 
see Anglo-English civilization pass away, but after all 



248 Seeing Things at Night 

there are other civilizations in the world, and there have 
been others, and others will come. Some, we suppose, 
may be worse, but there is at least a possibility that 
others may be better. Nor are we fond of hearing the 
English-speaking peoples talking about "the betterment 
of all mankind." It has at least a savor of a German 
heresy which put the world into a four years' war. 
Next to maltreating foreign nations, almost the worst 
thing that any powerful country can do is to set out to 
better them. 



Germany, in all truth, has enough to answer for 
without also being made responsible for the charges 
implied in humorous anecdotes. Margaret Deland, in 
rounding off her case against the Hun in Small Things, 
writes, "And I recall here the revealing remark of a 
German, a member of a commission which, before the 
war, was traveling in America: 'Yes/ he said, 'we 
found your railroad cars very comfortable — except the 
sleeping cars. Our wives don't like to climb into the 
upper berths.' " 

It may be remembered that one of the attacks made 
against England during the war by a famous German 
propagandist was contained in the story of the English 
woman who went to the hospital with a badly wounded 
face and upon being asked whether she had been bitten 
by a dog, replied, "No, another lady." 

Then, of course, the honor of the United States is 



A Reviewer 's Notebook 249 

called into question by the yarn about the man from 
Chicago who took his wife to a big New York res- 
taurant and ordered two broiled lobsters. The waiter 
returned to report that only one remained. "Only one 
lobster !" exclaimed the man from Chicago, "but what's 
my wife going to eat! " 

Still again a number of persons in America cannot 
bring themselves to sympathize with the Sinn Fein 
movement because of the well-known meeting between 
two Irishmen at which one inquired, "Who was that 
lady I seen you walking down the street with?" to 
which the other replied, "That was no lady, you chump; 
that was my wife." 

The Irishman's offense was not alone one of taste 
but of brutality as well, for we all know that as he said 
"You chump," he hit his friend violently over the head 
with a dull, blunt instrument. All this, in addition to 
the Ulster problem, makes the solution of the difficul- 
ties of Ireland seem insurmountable to many students 
of international affairs. 

Moreover, the success of the proposed league of na- 
tions is questioned by many persons on account of the 
revelation contained in the story about the Jugo-Slav 
who said, "Yes, but ain't we going to give any to dear 
old mother?" We have forgotten the exact details of 
the story, but as we remember, it was equally damning 
to the national aspirations of the Slovenes. 



250 Seeing Things at Night 

The Russian writer Dmitry Mereshkovsky has called 
Roshpin's The Pale Horse "the most Russian book of 
the period," according to the introduction in the new- 
edition. We are not disposed to dispute that statement 
after reading the first chapter, in which we found: 
"The hotel bores me to weariness. I know so well its 
hall porter in his blue tunic, its gilt mirrors, its carpets. 
There is a shabby sofa in my room and dusty curtains. 
I have placed three kilograms of dynamite under the 
table. I have brought it from abroad. The dynamite 
smells of a chemist's shop. I have headaches at night." 



He should have tried the dynamite. We understand 
that it is an excellent cure for headaches when used in- 
ternally. 



In his introduction to Madeleine: An Autobiography , 
Judge Ben B. Lindsey writes of the book, "It ought to 
be read and pondered over. It is true." For our part, 
we doubt whether the book will prove of any vital aid 
in solving what newspapers are fond of referring to as 
"white slavery"; for, although much of the book is con- 
vincing and seemingly veracious, it is hard to grasp its 
intent. Indeed, there is such a mass of informative de- 
tail in this life story of a woman of the underworld that 
it almost seemed to us as if it were intended to be a 
companion book to such works as How To Be a Boy 
Scout or Golf in Fifty Lessons. It is true that the 



A Reviewer's Notebook 251 

author of the book takes great pains to dwell frequently 
on the way in which her whole physical and spiritual 
nature revolted against the life which she was leading, 
but at other times there is a very evident intimation of 
her satisfaction in having been at any rate a leading 
member of her profession. Certainly, she writes with 
a good deal of gusto of the manner in which she and 
her friend Olga succeeded in selling the same bottle of 
champagne seven times to a befuddled gentleman, and 
undeniable pride in her accounts of how well she suc- 
ceeded professionally in an executive capacity. 

And yet, though we are not very much concerned 
with seeking for morals in books, there is one telling 
sermon in the volume, and all the more telling because 
it does not seem to have been within the plan of the 
writer. "Madeleine" ought to do something to clear 
away the mist in minds which confuse prudery and 
virtue. Even in her most degraded and sinful moments, 
Madeleine remains a proper person. In telling of her 
conversation with an associate in the life of shame 
Madeleine writes, "I felt sure that human degradation 
could go no further; when she took a box of cigarettes 
from under her pillow and offered me one I was speech- 
less with indignation." A year or so later, while Made- 
leine still has both feet set in the primrose path, she 
violently upbraids a girl who wants her to use rouge. 
"I would not have my face painted, and that settled 
it! Not only for that day but for all of the succeeding 



252 Seeing Things at Night 

days in which I remained in the business. I had to 
draw a line somewhere." Again she rails at present- 
day fashions, and observes, "If a girl had come into 
Lizzie Allen's parlors wearing some of the present-day 
street styles she would have been told to go upstairs 
and put on her clothes." 

But we were even more impressed by the chapter in 
which Madeleine goes to Butte to open a brothel and 
takes a dislike to the town because of its loose observ- 
ance of the Sabbath. "Clothing stores, groceries, sa- 
loons, small drygoods shops, cigar stands, dance halls 
and variety shows elbowing one another and wide open 
for business, gave a shock to my sense of the fitness of 
things." 



There are persons to whom a preposition is as in- 
spiring as a trumpet call. Dangle an "on" before a 
dying essayist and he will get up and dash you off some- 
thing entitled "On an Old Penwiper," or "On the De- 
lights of Washing Before Breakfast." It is essential 
that an essayist be an enthusiast about more things 
than prepositions. They are merely his springboards. 
He ought to be a man who wears his Corona on his 
sleeve, for there is no moment of the day or night in 
which he is safe from the onrush of ideas. I once knew 
a man who was a complete essayist at heart but a city 
editor by profession. He came into the office one July 



A Reviewer's Notebook 253 

afternoon and called me over. "As I was walking 
downtown," he began, "I saw a little piece of ice in the 
middle of Broadway. Write me a funny story about 
it." 

The assignment floored me completely. I idled over 
it for an hour and then reported back that I couldn't 
see a story in the suggestion. "What suggestion?" said 
the city editor. The thing had gone from his mind. He 
was of the mold from which great men are made. Hav- 
ing said of anything "Let it be done" he at once felt 
not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done 
it himself. The matter never came to his mind again. 
At the moment I spoke to him he was already deeply 
engrossed in a scheme for a story computing the value 
of all the lobster salad sold in the City of New York, 
exclusive of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, in 
a single evening. 

I have noticed that most essayists are like that. 
Their enthusiasms are intense, but not of long dura- 
tion. It is just as well. After all, there probably is no 
great field for expression in the subject of penwipers. 
The essayist does it once in a fine spirit of frenzy and 
then goes on to something else. If he were faithful to 
the one theme there's no telling when he might exhaust 
his market. 

Sometimes I am inclined to distrust the enthusiasm 
of the essayist. Being a man much moved to write, he 
comes to be so sensitive that even a puff of wind will 



254 Seeing Things at Night 

propel him into an essay. And then sometimes on dead 
calm days he will begin to write under the pretense that 
a breath from some far corner of the world has touched 
him. Perhaps it has. But then again it may be that 
he, too, is among the fakers. 

"It is time, I think," writes Alpha of the Plough, in 
Windfalls, "that some one said a good word for the 
wasp. He is no saint, but he is being abused beyond 
his deserts." 

But why is it time? Fabre has said some hundreds 
of thousands of good words about wasps, but even if he 
hadn't, whence comes the cry of "justice for the 
wasp"? The wasps themselves haven't complained. 
Nor is there much persuasion in what Alpha sets down. 

"Now the point about the wasp," he writes, "is that 
he doesn't want to sting you." Of still less moment to 
the world than the wrongs of the wasp are his motives 
and intentions. Any wasp who stings me will be wast- 
ing his time if he lingers around after the deed to ex- 
plain, "I didn't want to do it." 

Still, the whole trick of the essayist is to pick side- 
alley subjects. Selecting at random from Windfalls, 
there are On a Hansom Cab, Two Glasses of Milk, 
On Matches and Things. Few of them, it seems to me, 
are better than pretty good. That is hardly good 
enough. The essay is a stunt. Either the writer can 
balance his theme on the end of his nose or he can't. 



A Reviewer's Notebook 255 

What with the various new jobs which are being cre- 
ated, some enterprising university should found a 
School of Censorship. It might, most fittingly, be a 
Sumner school, and the college yell without question 
will be "Carnal I yell! I yell carnal!" 



At first we were inclined to look at prohibition with 
tolerance, because it meant a release from all the books 
which described what would happen to a guinea pig 
if he were inoculated with Bronx cocktails. The relief 
was temporary, for we find that it takes just as much 
time to read the heartrending accounts of the effect of 
one drop of nicotine placed on the tongue of a dog. 

In Habits That Handicap, by Charles B. Towns, we 
find the following ailments attributed directly or in- 
directly to the use of tobacco: Bright's disease, apo- 
plexy, chronic catarrh, headache, heart disease, lassi- 
tude, dizziness, low scholarship, small lung capacity, 
predisposition to alcoholic excesses, hardening of the 
arteries, paralysis of the optic nerve, blindness, acid 
dyspepsia, insomnia, epilepsy, muscular paralysis, can- 
cer, lack of appetite, insanity and loss of moral tone. 
Mumps, measles and beri-beri are slighted in the pres- 
ent edition. 

"There is nothing to be said in its favor," writes Mr. 
Towns, "save that it gives pleasure." 

"It seems," he adds in another portion of the book, 
"to give one companionship when one has none — some- 



256 Seeing Things at Night 

thing to do when one is bored — keeps one from feeling 
hungry when one is hungry and blunts the edge of hard- 
ship and worry." 

Suppose, then, that every ailment which Mr. Towns 
has traced to tobacco actually lies at its door — even 
then is the case for the prohibition of smoking per- 
suasive? Of course, low scholarship is a fearful and 
humiliating thing, but we wonder whether it is more 
devastating than loneliness. It is better, we think, to 
have a little lassitude now and then, or even a touch of 
acid dyspepsia, than to be without the weed which gives 
"one companionship when one has none." And con- 
sider the tremendous testimonial in favor of tobacco 
which Mr. Towns has written when he says that it gives 
"something to do when one is bored." Although we 
haven't the statistics for last year yet, we venture the 
guess that about 63 per cent of all the people who die 
in any one year cease living because they are bored. 
Boredom is the cause of 85 per cent of all actions for 
divorce. It fills our jails. Nations make war because 
of it. Social unrest, bedroom farces, tardiness, rude- 
ness, Blasphemy, crime, lies and yawning in the pres- 
ence of company all rise because of it. 

And so we are disposed to sit defiantly shoulder to 
shoulder with other smokers and to cry out against the 
foe who creeps ever closer through the haze, "Bring on 
your 'lack of appetite.' " 



A Reviewer's Notebook 257 

It may be true, as Mr. Towns says, that smoking 
causes a loss of moral tone, but if the smoker will save 
his coupons religiously at the end of a few months he 
will be able to exchange them for a book on character 
building. 



It seems to us that Booth Tarkington belongs at the 
top or thereabouts in American letters. We will be 
surprised and disappointed if Penrod does not persist 
for a century or so. And yet much of Tarkington's 
work is flawed by a curious failing. Almost invariably 
the novels are carefully thought out to a certain point, 
and then they weaken. This point occurs, as a rule, 
within a chapter or so of the end. The story "hangs," 
as the racetrack reporters express it, in the last few 
strides. In Ramsey Milholland, for instance, it seemed 
to us that Tarkington, after a minute development of a 
theme, cut it off abruptly. He was, according to our 
impression, a little tired and anxious to have it over 
with before he had actually reached the finishing mark. 
To-day we received a story which may provide an ex- 
planation. "Booth Tarkington," says a publisher's 
note, "probably uses more lead pencils than any other 
writer in America. Always he has disdained a type- 
writer. 

"He works at an artist's drawing table, and," the 
story continues, "with a little stock of paper before him 
he then sets about the actual business of composition 



258 Seeing Things at Night 

very slowly, very carefully. Every phrase — almost 
every word — is pondered, balanced, scrutinized before 
it is permitted to pass. As often as not a dozen phrases 
have been rejected before the final one, which seems to 
readers to come so trippingly, has been arrived at. In- 
dividual words are scored out again and again." 

All this makes the slackening of vigor toward the end 
of a long novel comprehensible. Though a man begin 
with a dozen well sharpened pencils catastrophes are 
sure to occur in the course of fifty or sixty thousand 
words. Finally, the author finds himself with an aching 
wrist and only one pencil, which has grown a little dull. 
If he is to add another chapter he must pause to find 
a safety razor blade and sharpen up. And so instead 
he rounds off the tale while lead remains. 



On the other hand, we feel certain that Harold Bell 
Wright composes on a typewriter, pausing only once 
every twenty-four hours to oil the machine with a 
little treacle. 



Robert W. Chambers uses an adding machine and 
Theodore Dreiser favors an ax. 



"Man is a machine," writes Dr. David Orr Edson 
in Getting What We Want, "with the directions for use 
written on his physiognomy — which society in general 
neglects to read. Through this omission much of the 



A Reviewer's Notebook 259 

unrest in the world has developed, and psychologists 
have been forced to recognize and attempt to cope 
with the protests of the psychophysical against unen- 
durable conditions of life." 

To us these seem true words. It isn't only that 
society neglects to read, but also that it reads awry. 
Again and again our legible physiognomy has been 
taken to mean, "Shake well before using," when any- 
body with half an eye ought to know that it says, 
"Lay on its side in a cool, dry place." 



We were discussing the education of H. 3rd the 
other day, and when we were asked where he was to go, 
of course we said, "The Rand School." 

"No," said the friend who put the question, "I don't 
believe it. By the time H. is ready to go to school 
you'll be saying that the Rand School is a reactionary 
institution and full of snobs." 



Perhaps, since he is to be a book reviewer, H. should 
go to a Montessori school. They teach the children to 
skip. 



Gerald Cumberland's Set Down in Malice reveals 
the interesting fact that Mrs. Shaw calls him "George." 
Moreover, she is quoted as saying "Don't be absurd, 
George." 



260 Seeing Things at Night 

There are limits to the success of the most adroit 
literary advertiser the modern world has known, as we 
learned from a trip to the British front two years ago. 
Our conducting officer had been Shaw's guide a few 
months before, and we were anxious to learn how he 
had impressed the army. 

"Oh, he was no end of nuisance," replied the young 
officer. "When I got him out to our mess I found out 
that he was a vegetarian, and I had to hop around and 
get him eggs and all sorts of truck." 



If Gerald Cumberland is thirty-one or less, Tales of 
a Cruel Country is an exceedingly promising collection 
of short stories. If, on the other hand, he has gone 
beyond that age we see only a doddering literary future 
for him. There are twenty- two stories in Tales of a 
Cruel Country and three of them are excellent. One, 
in fact, seems to us a superb short story, but many of 
the other nineteen are rot. Now, they are the sort of 
rot which a young man may turn out by the bushel and 
still go on to great things. "Her eyes are pits of dark- 
ness," "a beautiful animal," "whiter than the paper on 
which this little history is written," "he pulled his body 
together sensually," "his teeth bit more deeply into his 
lower lip," "brutally I tore her arms away and flung 
her from me as a man would fling away a snake that 
had coiled around him in his sleep"-^-that is the sort 
of rot we mean. 



A Reviewer's Notebook 261 

It has its place in the work of every young writer. 
In fact, if he writes honestly there is no skipping this 
period, which must be passed before he is ready to do 
more important work. Fortunately, there are several 
easy tests by which one may determine whether a writer 
is still in his salad days, in which he does as the ro- 
maines, or whether he is ready to go on and deal with 
hardier grasses. Ask him what the word "mirror" sug- 
gests to him and note whether he replies "a man shav- 
ing" or "a slender woman disrobing." Try him with 
"model" and see whether he replies "artist's" or "tene- 
ment," and finally, if he can meet your "bed" imme- 
diately with "eight hours' sleep" you may put him 
down as among those who have finished their literary 
stint of "half insane gleam of desire," "her eyes 
swooped into his," and "vermouth on purple trays." 



We are particularly interested in the publication of 
Clarence Buddington Kelland's The Little Moment of 
Happiness, because we made a dramatization of the 
novel last year which failed of production partly be- 
cause of the deplorable lapse in morals which Mr. Kel- 
land allows to his hero. The story concerns a Puri- 
tanical young American officer who is stationed in 
Paris during the war and falls in love with a beautiful 
French girl named Andree. Now, Andree is not like 
the girls whom Kendall, our hero, has been accustomed 
to meet in America. "A young man love a young girl," 



262 Seeing Things at Night 

says Andree, "and a young girl love a young man. . . . 
They marry, maybe. That is well. But maybe they 
do not marry. It is expensive to marry. Then they 
see each other very often, and he gives her money so 
she can live. . . . That is well, because they are 
fidele." 

Naturally, we were as much shocked by this doc- 
trine as Kendall, the hero; but, since Mr. Kelland's 
story was largely concerned with the young man's even- 
tual decision to make shift without benefit of clergy, 
we could see no way open for us to act about the refor- 
mation of Andree 's character. As a matter of fact, 
owing to the exigencies of dramatic action, we were 
compelled to make the affair much more precipitate 
than in the book. We gave the hero an order to return 
to the front. We had off-stage bands of soldiers wan- 
dering up and down singing "Madelon," in the most 
heartrending way, and, finally, we introduced an air 
raid to shut off the Metro so that the heroine should 
have no available means of transportation to go home 
even if she desired to leave the apartment of the hero. 

It was not enough. A manager read the play and at 
first seemed favorably inclined. Then he began to 
think it over and finally he summoned us to a confer- 
ence. 

"Suppose you had been an American officer in 
France during the war," he said. 

We accepted the supposition. 



A Reviewer's Notebook 263 

"And then suppose after you came home you took 
your wife, or your mother, or your fiancee, to see this 
play." 

We nodded again and he paused for dramatic ef- 
fect. 

"At the end of the third act when they found that 
this girl was going to stay all night in the apartment of 
this American officer, suppose they had turned to you 
and said, 'Heywood, did you live like that in Paris?' 
Or, even if they said nothing, but just looked at you 
accusingly, what would you say to them?" 

We suggested, "Isn't it rather stuffy in here? Do 
you mind if I go out to smoke?" But that did not 
seem wholly satisfactory, and so our version of The 
Little Moment of Happiness never reached the stage. 



The office force got started on a discussion of what 
character in fiction each of us would take out to dinner 
if he had his choice. Most of the men spoke for Becky 
Sharp, although there were scattering bids here and 
there for Thai's. But the night editor, who had put in 
a long evening of it, said, "My choice would be little 
Eva." 

"Why?" we asked tactfully. 

"Because she'd probably have to go home early!" 
he answered, 



264 Seeing Things at Night 

Brian Kent, the hero of Harold Bell Wright's new 
novel, The Re-Creation of Brian Kent, is first intro- 
duced to us as a defaulting bank clerk. Later he is 
reformed by the influence of "dear old Auntie Sue" and 
becomes a novelist. His first book sells so well that 
in six months he is able to pay back all the money he 
stole and have something left over. This would seem 
to prove that Brian was an unusually successful novel- 
ist. Or, again, it may merely indicate that he had no 
real gift for embezzlement. 



It rather seems to us that the distinct failure of po- 
litical radicalism in America may be explained in part 
by its devotion to the concrete as opposed to the ab- 
stract. "We are going to make the world over anew 
at 12:25 o'clock p. m. next Thursday," says the con- 
crete radical. And then Thursday comes and it rains 
and nothing is done about fixing up the world, and all 
the followers of the young radical are disappointed, 
and they go home firmly convinced that the world never 
will be fixed up. The man who realizes the value of 
the abstract ideal is shrewder. He says: "The world 
ought to be scrubbed up a lot, and if we can make a 
start next Thursday some time after breakfast we will. 
But if we can't do it then we've just got to keep on 
plugging away, because the job must be done." 

In other words, the man with abstract ideals makes 



A Reviewer's Notebook 265 

the job the important thing. The concrete man is im- 
pressed more by the date of the doing. 



A little abstraction is an excellent thing for the re- 
former or the revolutionist. It provides, we should say, 
a sort of reinforced concrete purpose. 



At the worst, an abstract ideal is pemmican to carry 
the voyager through the long nights until the ice begins 
to break. 



Some writers are hardly fair to women, but not so 
Julian Street. In his new novel, After Thirty, he de- 
scribes marriage as a canoe trip beginning in the Rap- 
ids of Romance, and later he observes: "Presently 
they come to the first cataract — the birth of their first 
child — a long, hard portage, with the larger portion of 
the burden on the wife." 

Generous, we call it. 



"Mr. Seton's new book of the outdoors," says the 
jacket of Woodland Tales, "is meant for children of six 
years and upward. But in the belief that mother or 
father will be active as leader, those chapters which are 
devoted to woodcraft are addressed to the parent, who 
throughout is called 'The Guide.' " 

So far we have found the business of being a father 
hard enough without assuming the responsibilities of 



266 Seeing Things at Night 

"The Guide" as well. The only piece of woodcraft 
within our knowledge which we can pass on to H. 3rd 
comes from Harvey O'Higgins, who says that he can 
always find his way about in London by remembering 
that the moss grows on the north side of an English- 
man. 



"This history of Wells/' said our friend Rollo, 
"seems to me to confirm the story of creation as told 
in Genesis. The impression which I gather is that the 
Creator attempted various life forms again and again, 
and each time wasn't satisfied and swept them all away. 
Apparently he was experimenting continually through 
the ages until finally he got to me and said, 'That's it,' 
and stopped." 

"But you don't know that he's stopped," objected A. 
W. "What seems to you a pause is only a fraction of a 
second in infinity. It seems to me more likely that the 
Creator is just shaking his head and saying, 'Well, I 
suppose I'd better go back to the Neanderthal man and 
start all over again.' " 



A magazine editor is a man who says "Sit down," 
then knits his brows for five minutes, and suddenly 
brightens as he exclaims, "Why don't you do us a series 
like Mr. Dooley?" 



A Reviewer's Notebook 267 

In his book Average Americans, Theodore Roosevelt 
comments on the fact that all classes and conditions of 
men were to be found in the ranks of the American 
army — waiters, chauffeurs, lawyers. He adds: 

"A lieutenant once spoke to me after an action, say- 
ing that when he was leading his platoon back from 
the battle one of his privates asked him a question. 
The question was so intelligent and so well thought out 
that the lieutenant said to him: 'What were you before 
the war?' The reply was 'City editor of The Cleveland 
Plain Dealer/ " 

The story does not surprise us. Years before the 
war we maintained that if ever a catastrophe great 
enough to shake the world came along a certain ap- 
pearance of intelligence might be jarred loose even in 
city editors. 



Henry Ford, so the story goes, called upon the edi- 
tor of his magazine The Dearborn Independent to as- 
certain how things were going. 

"We're too statistical, I'm afraid," said the editor. 
"Of course we can try and get that sort of stuff over 
by putting it in the form of how many hours it takes 
to turn out enough end-to-end Fords to reach from 
here to Shanghai and back, but that sort of thing has 
been done before. It doesn't take the curse off. What 
we need is some good, live fiction." 

"All right," replied Mr. Ford, "let's have fiction," 



268 Seeing Things at Night 

"It's not as easy as all that," objected the young edi- 
tor. "There's very keen competition among all the 
magazines for the fiction writers, and I'd need a pretty 
big appropriation to get any of them." 

"Why not get some of the bright young men on the 
magazine to write us some fiction?" suggested Ford. 

"That's not feasible," said the editor. "Fiction's a 
highly specialized product. Nobody on our magazine 
has the complete equipment to turn out successful fic- 
tion." 

"Ah, but that's where efficiency comes in," inter- 
rupted Ford triumphantly. "Get one of the young men 
to think up an idea. Then let another outline the gen- 
eral structure. A third can do the descriptions and an- 
other one the dialogue. And then you — you're the edi- 
tor — you assemble it." 



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